This article was originally published in The eXile on September 17, 2004

Exile editor Mark Ames exposes a rare fawning side while interviewing his lyrical hero, Mark E. Smith of The Fall, while Smith, who is notorious for abusing journalists (even reportedly putting a cigarette out in the eyeball of one Brit journo), reveals a charming, disarming side. Particularly in the number of times he addresses Ames by his first name, giving the interview a kind of Paintwork/Dale Carnegie sensibility.

In preparation for this weekend’s back-to-back Fall concerts, Ames phoned Smith up at a recording studio in Manchester, where the Fall are laying down new tracks. A woman with a French accent answered the phone — perhaps MES’s beau. She was very particular about getting Ames’ first and last name. We pick up from the moment Smith takes the phone…

Smith: Hello.

Ames: Yeah, is this Mark?

Smith: Yeah.

Ames: Thanks for taking my call. So you guys are in the studio right now?

Smith: Yeah, we just finished recording all morning.

[Line goes dead]

Ames: Ah shit.

[Dials, Smith answers]

Ames: Hi, this is Mark again. Sorry about that. KGB cut us off. Happens a lot.

Smith: Ha-ha! Is that it?

Ames: So you guys are working on a new album?

Smith: Well Mark, it’s actually like between-album songs, you know. Not a new album, just some between-album songs that we’re doing.

Ames: I heard a new song you guys did recently on BBC called “Clasp Your Hands” I think. It kind of sounded to me more like a Grotesque or Slates-era song.

Smith: Yeah, it does sound like Grotesque, doesn’t it? I was thinking the same thing.

Ames: Was that intentional or did it just turn out that way?

Smith: No Mark, it wasn’t intentional you know, it’s just how the song was done. My new bass player wrote it, they’re all much younger than I am.

Ames: How do you like your new lineup? How do they compare to previous ones?

Smith: Well I think this band’s the best one yet.

Ames: Do you think the sound of this lineup is going back to the old sort of…

Smith: We’re not trying to, you know. I don’t ever go back and listen to the old Fall albums. I don’t like listening to stuff I’ve already done, unless I have to if we’re doing an old song in our set.

Ames: Raw, lo-fi rockabilly always seemed to be one of your biggest influences.

Smith: Yeah, yeah, that’s right, Mark.

Ames: How did you find your new band, or they find you?

Smith: I don’t know, through contacts and stuff. I don’t like hiring Fall fans, you know what I mean? Don’t want people coming to me. I prefer if they don’t even really know The Fall.

Ames: You’re very prolific. I was wondering if you ever had a crash after a hard working period of a few years and you just can’t do anything.

Smith: Well I haven’t had a vacation in five years, you know!

Ames: Jesus… (Laughs uneasily)

Smith: I really don’t understand these bands that take time off, like a year off, after their albums. I like to keep working, you know. Cuz after I put out an album, if I’m just sitting around for a couple of months I get bored, you know? You turn on the radio and it’s just nothing but crap, these awful bands and all the awful music, you know. So I have to go back in and make some new songs.

Ames: You’ve always said that the world needs The Fall. Is that still the case?

Smith: Ha-ha! Yeah, Mark, I think it’s still true. It hasn’t gotten any better.

Ames: Especially in Russia. It’s just kind of waking up after about 10 years of shitty pop, the loudest awful pop imaginable. So I think it’s really good timing for you guys.

Smith: (laughs) Yeah, I agree, I think it’s a good time too. They’ve got all that 80s crap they play there, don’t they, Mark? All that 80s and 90s crap.

Ames: Matt Damon was supposed to come here to promote his new movie where he plays a fearless spy mixed up with the Russian mafia, and he just canceled his trip because of fears of terrorism.

Smith: Ha-ha-ha! Oh yeah. That’s typical isn’t it? The Chechens are going to get Matt Damon. Ha-ha!

Ames: Are you worried about something happening at The Fall show?

Smith: No Mark, I don’t think the Chechens care about the Fall (laughs). Anyway, we had terrorism here all my life, you know, with the IRA. I don’t even think about it, you know.

Ames: You once said “Serial killers have always been a bore in my books.” What about terrorists, do you think they’re boring too? [Line cut off] Hello? Fuck…

[Ames calls back]

Smith: Hallo.

Ames: I guess the KGB doesn’t like all this terrorism talk.

Smith: Ha-ha! Yeah, seems that way. You were talking about this Matt Damon, right? What a [unintelligible]… I can’t believe he won’t come out. Ha-ha! Incredible. I think I know who you’re talking about now, that actor.

Ames: He’s afraid to come to Moscow. I hope all the Russians boycott his movie here.

Smith: Yeah! They should boycott it. He deserves it.

Ames: The name “The Fall” came from the Camus novel, and Camus was influenced by the Russian writers, like Dostoeyevskii.

Smith: Yeah, that’s right Mark, Camus was influenced by the Russians.

Ames: Did you ever go through a Russophilia stage yourself, with their writers or artists?

Smith: Yeah, still am a Russophile, still going through it.

Ames: Who?

Smith: I like Gogol, still read him.

Ames: What is it about Gogol that you like?

Smith: I don’t know Mark, he’s just so surreal and comical. I mean this story about the nose coming to life, you know, really great. There’s something about his stories.

Ames: It’s strange that he seemed to come out of nowhere. There was almost no Russian literature before Gogol and then he came out of nowhere to write these stories that seem so modern and disturbing.

Smith: Yeah, exactly. He’s really good, isn’t he.

Ames: So what are you expecting when you come out here? Do you have any expectations?

Smith: I was in New York twice in the last three months, you know. And uh, I met a lot of Russians there. There’re more Russians in New York than Americans, you know?

Ames: Yeah, New York is full of Russians. Did you hang out with any?

Smith: Yeah, you know, I met a few of these guys.

Ames: Heavy drinkers?

Smith: They’re tough guys, these Russians, you know what I mean? They’re really tough.

Ames: Yeah, Russians are tough, for Europeans. So you won’t be doing any tourism stuff?

Smith: No Mark, I never do that wherever we go.

Ames: You’ve been to Eastern Europe?

Smith: Yeah, we played Vilnius and Prague.

Ames: How did you like it out there?

Smith: I don’t know, they were all over us, the Czechs, you know what I mean? I didn’t really, uh, see what the big fuss was. I mean all these English people are saying, ‘Isn’t Prague great,’ you know, but there wasn’t much there. Just…

Ames: Yeah, I lived there briefly and hated it.

Smith: Ha-ha! You too? That’s what I thought. It’s full of stupid college students, you know. They all think they’re part of something. I couldn’t stand the place. Nothing there at all.

Ames: People think somehow if you go there it gives you literary status and then you can write your memoir about it.

Smith: That’s what it is, isn’t it Mark. It’s like they all think it’s something they’ve got to do, isn’t it?

Ames: Yeah, but it’s safe.

Smith: Yeah it is.

Ames: Unlike Moscow. Moscow doesn’t feel so safe, so those types don’t really come here, you know.

Smith: Ha! Yeah, right.

Ames: You guys have influenced pretty much every band in the last 20 years that people now consider important. Does that piss you off that so many bands have ripped you off? Do you want to sue them or something?

Smith: Naw, it doesn’t piss me off. I just hate it when they use my name, you know? I don’t like it when I see “The Fall” used by all these bands as their influence, you know what I mean? But it doesn’t piss me off that they ripped us off, no.

Ames: Well do you find it flattering?

Smith: No I don’t find it flattering, not at all. Because they’re all such crap, you know. I just wish they would stop using our name. I hate opening a magazine and seeing my name in some article about a crap band.

Ames: Like Pavement. I got genuinely angry the first time I heard Pavement.

Smith: Yeah, so did I. My label was really angry, they wanted to do something about it.

Ames: And Sonic Youth too. Although at least they mixed their own sound with yours.

Smith: Yeah, they’re not as bad as Pavement in that way. I don’t like any of it really, Mark.

Ames: What bands do you like? Are there any bands you’re listening to these days?

Smith: Yeah, there’s this band Mouse on Mars from Germany, I heard them a few months ago. They’re really good, I like them a lot. And I’ve been listening to a lot of reggae lately.

Ames: Yeah? Some of your songs have a reggae beat, like Kurious Oranj.

Smith: Yeah, right, it is kind of reggae.

Ames: Will your band do a kind of reggae-rockabilly sound on your new stuff?

Smith: Well the band members like that sound. They’re a whole generation younger than I am, you know, and they’re really into the reggae and old rockabilly. So that’s the sound in some of our songs, yeah.

Ames: Do you think that’s because old rockabilly is sort of the least bullshit sound after all the trends?

Smith: I think that’s right, yeah.

Ames: Are your new bandmates influencing you as well?

Smith: Yeah, I think so. I mean the bass player was like four years old when The Fall started, you know. (laughs). None of them were big fans of The Fall, so they’re not trying to reproduce it, you know. I don’t even think they liked The Fall that much when they joined. Ha-ha!

Ames: Yeah, you don’t want them to fawn all over you, you want them to push you.

Smith: That’s right, Mark. Keeps it more surprising.

Ames: You once said you try to limit the amount of information you take in otherwise it can scramble your brain. Do you still live by that?

Smith: Yeah, you don’t want to get too influenced by things, you know. Most of the new music is just crap anyway. You just get distracted. We always try to do something different, you know. Like “White Lightening.” I don’t know if you’ve heard that song?

Ames: Oh yeah! In fact when we first started this newspaper, that song became a kind of production day theme song in our office. The Russians we worked with loved it.

Smith: Really? Ha, good!

This article was originally published in The eXile on September 17, 2004

Still like to know more? The eXile: Sex, Drugs and Libel in the New Russia co-authored by Mark Ames and Matt Taibbi (Grove).

This article first appeared in The eXile on November 11, 2003

TBILISI, GEORGIA – If you want to understand what’s really going on beneath the current election crisis in the former Soviet republic of Georgia — a struggle that threatens to push the country back into the kind of civil war which killed tens of thousands from 1989 through 1993 – then you need to pull the camera back. Way back, to the global level.

That’s because Georgia is a battleground not just between local political factions vying for power, but also between the geostrategic interests of America and Russia, between competing Big Oil interests, and between the forces of globalization and the forces which defy globalization (chaos, tradition, isolation).

Georgia, in other words, is one of the world’s key battlegrounds on every level that matters, and that is why so much is at stake in the election crisis. Most tiny nations — Georgia has a population of about 5 million — would relish the thought of being so important; the opportunity to play off powers and up one’s price would seem to be limitless. In Georgia’s case, its location and its importance have been its curse.

Bad luck not just because it means the Georgians are surrounded by venal, war-like Caucasus states or brutal, imperial Russia, but also because, thanks to the Caspian Sea oil, the Americans have been no less deeply involved in Georgia…with the usual destruction that comes with American aid and regime support in this part of the world. In Russia, American-backed aid and loans were a crucial factor in creating one of the most corrupt regimes on earth and its subsequent default.

In Georgia, the situation is even worse. America has given more aid per capita to Georgia over the past ten years than to any other country besides Israel. The corruption is correspondingly worse: Georgia ranks far below Russia on the Transparency International corruption rating, below all CIS countries, below even Papua-New Guinea, and ahead of only five other nations, including such illustrious examples as Haiti and Nigeria. You won’t see a single result of all those hundreds of millions of dollars in aid grants — everything was stolen, every last penny. So you have to assume that the aid served another purpose besides establishing democracy or helping the Georgian people — and that purpose is the Baku-Ceyhan pipeline, the Frontera oil company, and NATO and U.S. Special Forces access.

The result is that Georgia, which just 15 years ago was considered the Soviet Union’s wealthiest republic, is today one of the poorest and most corrupt nations in the world, with huge chunks of its territory in the hands of separatists or local petty despots, hundreds of thousands of internally-displaced refugees, an infrastructure in such disrepair it makes Russia look like Switzerland, a ghost town when it comes to attracting foreign investment and capital. Its impoverished citizens, who are lucky to receive their wages or pensions, are also weighted down by a crippling external debt.

And yet somehow, in spite of this, Georgia is one of the most charming places on earth.

In order to untangle the web that connects Georgia’s election crisis to global politics, keep in mind four things: James Baker III, Ambassador Richard Miles, Caspian Sea oil, and Russia.

When James Baker was sent out to Georgia this past July to lecture its President, Eduard Shevardnadze, about the need to ensure that the upcoming parliamentary elections were “free and fair,” it must have raised a lot of eyebrows. Eyebrows of the “you’ve got to be shitting me” variety.

James Baker? This is the same guy who Bush Jr. hired in 2000 to steal the Florida vote, handing the U.S. presidency over to a tool who lost by half a million votes. The way Baker railroaded Bush into the presidency has done more damage to American democracy than anything since Nixon and Watergate. Sending him into corrupt Georgia to demand that they have “free and fair elections” is like sending Yegor Gaidar into Iraq in order to advise them on privatization and the transition to a market economy — which Bush also did.

So what the hell was Jim Baker doing in Georgia playing the role of some Jimmy Carter bleeding heart? After all, Bush didn’t send him to Azerbaijan, which became the former Soviet Union’s first official dynasty after its pro-U.S. leader handed power to his son in a rigged election. Nor have we raised much of a fuss about free and fair elections to our other new friends in the region. Fuss? Tchya, right. Uzbek strongman Karimov must have received about 100,000 dollars in aid for every American soldier he allowed to be based in his police state (assuming we have about 5,000 soldiers there). Or you could say that we gave about $1,000,000 in aid to Karimov for every political opponent he’s got rotting in jail, boiled skin melted onto busted bones. And Kyrgyzstan — which just started getting its big Santa packages from Uncle Sam after it gave us an air base – has actually slid backwards into deeper authoritarianism ever since Bush started stuffing its leaders’ pockets.

So why was Baker playing the knit-capped human rights hippie in Georgia? The obvious answer is that he wasn’t. When James Baker wades into an oil-soaked, unstable region full of corrupt despots, points at one and tells him he has to play fair this time, it means only one thing: “You’re out, we’re backing new people, and we expect you to go peacefully or else.”

Baker is more than just the man responsible for engineering the closest thing America has ever had to a coup d’etat. He’s also Mr. Oil. Specifically, Caspian Sea oil. His law firm, Baker Botts, boasts on its web page, “Baker Botts has been and continues to be the leading international law firm involved in the reemergence of the oil, gas and related hydrocarbon transportation industries in the Caspian region and has one of the most active practices of any U.S. law firm with respect to other types of investment in the region.” The Caspian Sea oil is set to be pumped out of Azerbaijan and transported via Georgia to the Turkish Mediterranean sea port of Ceyhan. Former President Clinton had labeled the oil route a “vital national interest” while Vice President Dick Cheney named the oil region a vital strategic interest for the first half of the 21st Century. The U.S. oil firms with Caspian Sea interests seamlessly tied their interests to America’s via their lawyer, James Baker. Among notables with interests in the Caspian Sea oil are Brent Scowcroft, Bush Sr.’s National Security Advisor; John Sununu, Bush Sr.’s Chief of Staff; and Zbigniew Brzezinski, Carter’s National Security Advisor. Then there is Frontera Oil, a company set up five years ago specifically to exploit Georgian oil. Its board includes former Clinton CIA chief John Deutch and former Texas senator Lloyd Bensten. Frontera’s chairman is former Clinton deputy energy secretary Bill White, who was in charge of formulating Clinton’s Caspian Sea policy.

As you will see, it’s the oil transnationals who decided on regime change in Georgia, using a sudden interest in Jeffersonian democracy as the pretext, while indulging the the anti-democratic but stable Aliyev dynasty in nextdoor Azerbaijan.

By the way, if you think that Baker is just a dedicated patriot doing his job for God and country, remember this: Baker Botts is also the lead counsel for Prince Sultan bin Abdul Aziz, the Saudi defense minister, defending him in a lawsuit filed by the families of the victims of 9/11 — that’s right, Baker is defending Saudi terror-financiers against American terror victims. Which shouldn’t come as too much of a surprise, considering that Baker is also the senior counsel to the notorious Carlyle Group of investors. On September 11th, 2001, Baker was reportedly with members of the bin Laden family – his business partners – in the Ritz Carlton in Washington D.C.

So let me repeat it again: James Baker getting sent to Georgia by President Bush in order to demand that Shevardnadze hold free and fair elections is tantamount to a push for a coup.

Which brings us to Richard Miles, the U.S. ambassador to Georgia. Miles, who served in the Marines and studied Russian at the U.S. Army Institute in Germany (read: U.S. intelligence), is a career diplomat specializing in military-strategic issues and Eastern Europe. Not surprising then that he played a key role in at least one U.S.-backed democratic coup and military takeover just a few years ago.

Ambassador Miles was the chief of mission (effectively ambassador) to Yugoslavia from 1996 to 1999. He was one of the key instruments in America’s drive to push the Kosovo crisis towards war and eventual occupation by NATO forces. If you go back and read accounts of Miles’ service, he was first involved with the Serbian democratic opposition in the 1997 elections and drive to get Milosevic thrown out of power. Miles’ biography hilariously cites his speeches to opposition leaders in which he tells the Serbs about his alleged hippie days and sit-ins at the Pentagon in the 60s. I dunno, call me a sin-ic and all, but somehow I have a hard time seeing Ambassador Miles beating a tambourine and denouncing the pigs…

Despite his and America’s efforts, the Serbian opposition failed to unseat Milosevic in 1997. So American policy moved to undermine him by backing a different opposition group — the KLA — and pushing for war in Kosovo. The following year, in 1998, Miles took a leading role in the Western “observer” convoys which oversaw cease-fires in Kosovo. After the war, a BBC documentary revealed that the OSCE mission in Kosovo was a front for the CIA to gather intelligence on the Serbs, then prepare for and trigger the war against Serbia.

In 2000, Milosevic was thrown out of power in circumstances that look a lot like today’s in Georgia: a rigged election leading to street protests by the U.S.-backed democratic-nationalist opposition and a powerful youth group; their refusal to recognize the results; and a stand-off which threatened to spill into civil war. American funding, propaganda, and the war in Kosovo were all key to getting rid of Milosevic, and it worked, with Richard Miles running the whole American-engineered coup. The result was that Milosevic was thrown out of power, a pro-U.S. government took power, aid started to flow, and American bases in Kosovo look secure for a long time to come. Miles wasn’t there to oversee the final stage of the coup and takeover that he spearheaded — in 2000, he moved to the ambassadorship in Bulgaria, speeding this tiny “New Europe” nation into NATO’s orbit, a move effected, some allege, by funneling aid through friendly yet corrupt Bulgarian politicians.

Miles was named U.S. Ambassador to Georgia in March of 2002. Roughly ten years earlier, he had been named ambassador to Azerbaijan, the first leg of the Caspian Sea oil pipeline, and he served there long enough to watch approvingly as Haidar Aliyev established his decidedly anti-democratic dynasty.

Miles was named ambassador to Georgia last year at a crucial moment. America had just introduced its first units of Special Forces ostensibly to train special Georgian battalions to rid the Pankisi Gorge of supposed Al Qaeda terrorists. It caused an uproar in Russia and was one of the key moves which drastically cooled relations between Russia and America. The Al Qaeda rumors were generally recognized as a bogus excuse to introduce American forces, thereby pulling Georgia deeper into America’s grip. Not that the Georgians minded — most welcomed the arrival of the American Green Berets, naively believing that they would protect Georgia from the Russians and reconquer lost territory. This move backfired and the Russians now have more control over Georgia than any time since the collapse of the Soviet Union, but more on that later.

In his Senate confirmation hearings in Washington that year, Miles began his statement, “President Shevardnadze will retire in 2005. As you well know, three years is the blink of an eye in the world of politics. A top priority of U.S. policy on Georgia during this critical period will be to help Georgian political leaders and Georgian society to prepare for a peaceful and democratic transition of power in 2005.”

Sounds nice on the surface, but what it means in the local context is this: America is not only going to make sure that this “transition of power” takes place, but how and to whom. Here’s how: “As we engage with a new generation of leaders, we will also maintain a partnership with President Shevardnadze in his commitment to advancing democratic and market economic reform and fighting corruption.” Leaving aside the black humor — America partnering up with Shevardnadze to fight corruption is about as insane as Hitler partnering up with the Iron Guard to fight anti-Semitism in the Balkans — his mission was clear: to put into power younger, more pliant Georgian politicians. Shevardnadze was bad for stability: he is 75 years old, grossly unpopular, too wily to control.

And this is where the global/local connection gets confusing.

Russia. What the hell was Russia’s role in all of this?

Any Georgian will tell you that Russia’s role has been purely destructive, an attempt to keep control. Russians will answer that the Georgians brought it all on themselves through their hostile, often brutal anti-Russian behavior which drove out hundreds of thousands of ethnic Russians.

Russia was behind the carving up of Georgian territory, supporting separatists who control Abkhazia in the northwest and and South Ossetia in the north (which have been practically annexed by Russia) as well as a de facto breakaway region in Adjaria, whose capital, Batumi, is now the site of an annual August Love Parade for Russia’s rich techno youth. Russia has military bases in Georgia that it wants to keep. In other words, Russia has been holding a gun to Georgia’s head, telling it that if it tries to leave Russia’s orbit, it will do so in rags. Georgia has defiantly resisted even to the point of self-destruction — if you know the sense of pride and self-worth Georgians have, you’d understand it.

Russia and Georgia have been in a kind of war of attrition for the past decade now, with Russia intermittently applying its instruments of torture (separatism, cutting off gas supplies, closing off markets) and Georgia vainly trying to rapidly absorb itself into the West in the naive belief that somehow they can escape their geographic fate. The war of attrition’s balance was seriously upset last year with the introduction of American Green Berets. That, combined with the recent groundbreaking on the Caspian Sea pipeline, seemed to radically shift things in Georgia’s favor.

The Russians, however, reacted quietly, brutally, and efficiently. Last year, Putin calmed down the hysterics over the American Special Forces in Georgia by proclaiming that it was “no big deal.” The White House and Big Oil companies must have been giving each other high fives over that facing of Russia, right in their own back yards! But by this summer, there was no joy in Texasville .

Russian energy monopolies Gazprom and RAO-ES managed to essentially take over the natural gas and much of the energy grid networks in Georgia. On July 1st of this year, Gazprom, which had just bought out Georgia’s gas pipelines, signed a secret 25-year agreement to be the sole supplier of gas to Georgia, while at the same time, Tblisi’s energy grid was secretly sold to RAO-UES, headed by self-described “liberal-imperialist” Anatoly Chubais.

Washington was, to say the least, not pleased. After the sale, the White House issued a statement expressing its regret that the power grid had been sold off by its American owners, AES. The news caused protests in Tblisi, and the opposition parties slammed Shevardnadze. He reacted dismissively, calling his critics “incompetent.” Shortly afterwards, he started to show his anger by attacking AES as “robbers and cheats.” This wasn’t so much an attack on AES as on the American government which backed AES’s investment as part of a national strategic interest.

In fact AES probably had no choice: massive corruption kept AES from even hoping to turn a profit, Russian energy supplies played havoc with its network, and finally, some old-fashioned pressure was applied: AES’s chief financial officer was found dead in his Tblisi home.

This not only dramatically increased Russia’s control over Georgia, but it raised questions as to how Russia gained control. Who sold it all to them? Which country owned which politician? Could it be possible that Shevardnadze had joined with his old enemies Russia against his closest friend, America? Why would he do it? The oldest reasons of all: power and money. Shevardnadze, and the small clan around him which has stolen nearly everything of worth in Georgia for going on a decade, needs to stay in power at all costs. At some point they must have decided that it was in their best interests to side with the Russians.

Washington must have sensed that it was losing control over Georgia and its leadership. In early June — about 6 weeks before Baker flew to Tblisi to give his famous civics lesson to Shevardnadze — President Bush sent his top energy advisor, Stephen Mann, to Tblisi to warn him that “Georgia should do nothing that undercuts the powerful promise of an East-West energy corridor.” He added, “Support for any competing gas export pipelines at this stage would be destructive for Shah Deniz,” a separate U.S.-backed gas pipeline that will travel from Azerbaijan to Turkey via Georgia. In other words, the Americans were losing Georgia, and Bush sent Mann in to warn Shevardnadze not to let it happen. Clearly the US had word of what was going on with Gazprom and RAO-UES. But they were unable to stop it.

Now the menacing appearance by James Baker one month later in Shevardnadze’s office, lecturing him about free and fair elections, makes more sense. America was losing Georgia to the Russians. Goodbye Caspian Sea oil, the world’s last untapped ocean of fuel. Goodbye NATO bases and forward momentum. Sure, Shevardnadze had done a lot for America in the past — Baker still talks about their warm personal friendship – but that was then and this was now. One can see the chairman of ExxonMobil saying to Baker, like Jeff Goldblum in Deep Cover, “I know you like Shevardnadze and so do I, but…[sharply wipes right palm of hand over left palm]…he’s gotta go.” By sending Baker, the Vladimiro Montesinos of the Bush Administration, to tell Shevardnadze to make sure his elections were exactly the kind of elections Baker had denied to his own countrymen, Bush was sending a message: he had declared war on Shevardnadze.

This article first appeared in The eXile on November 11, 2003

Still like to know more? The eXile: Sex, Drugs and Libel in the New Russia co-authored by Mark Ames and Matt Taibbi (Grove).

From today’s edition of NSFW Corp

SALT LAKE CITY, UT—I have some explaining to do. As you know, I went missing for roughly 36 hours — no phone, no email, no nothing — roughly from the time of Clinton’s Satanic speech Wednesday night until the time which you receive this. First, let me tell you that I am fine, alive, and though a bit shaken up and haggard looking from sleeplessness, I was not mistreated or molested in any way.

In my last panicked correspondence to the outside world, I was begging the NSFW Corp’s Paul Carr to arrange some sort of commando mission to Charlotte to rescue our man-on-the-ground there, James Kotecki. I was terrified that the Tracy Flickites who gathered in their numbers in Charlotte would get into James’ brain and swallow his soul. That if James so much as fell asleep for five minutes, the Flickites would sneak a pod next to our Convention Correspondent’s bed, and he’d wake up full of hope and optimism. Or worse.

So as dusk approached Wednesday evening here in the greater Salt Lake Basin, and I was racing down I-15 to my secure hilltop location after playing poker with a bunch of middle-aged local jazz musicians, I fired off a series of increasingly panicked emails to Paul: “We need to get him out of Charlotte ASAP. Send him to Chicago to cover the teacher’s strike, where they’re fighting Rahm Emanuel and Arne Duncan. Or maybe that’s too close to the heat: Send James to the Caymans to get some rest. Or to Moldova, or Costa Rica. Anywhere but Charlotte! Whatever we do, don’t let James go to sleep!”

I realize now that it wasn’t James I was panicking over. It was me. As soon as Clinton took the stage Wednesday night, blathering for hours about how he and Barack Obama had done everything the Republican Right had told them they should do, only better and more competently than the Republicans themselves manage to, so why aren’t the Republicans happy? Why aren’t they patting Bill and Barack on the head and telling them “Good job, Bubba!” — feeding them Milk Bones treats like they promised? When I heard Clinton tape-looping that same rancid 1990s New Democrat theme, that’s when it all came crashing down for me.

Let me step back a moment for our readers. Some of you might be wondering what I’m doing in Salt Lake City… (Continued…click here)

To read the rest of this article by Mark Ames on the the harmful effects of sleep deprivation in the Mormon Zion, while being forced to watch the 2012 Democratic Party Convention like that Clockwork Orange guy, click here (open viewing).

This article was published at Not Safe For Work Corp, where I’m now Senior Editor. Subscribe, or face eternal damnation: http://www.nsfwcorp.com/subscribe

Buy The eXile: Sex, Drugs and Libel in the New Russia co-authored by Mark Ames and Matt Taibbi (Grove).

This story was first published in the defunct Radar magazine on March 7, 2008

How “liberal” is newly-anointed Russian President-elect Dmitry Medvedev, the one so many people are saying represents a possible thaw in post-Putinpolitics? My Moscow newspaper just found out the hard way—one of Russia’s leading printing presses censored us yesterday over a page-six photo essay that we’d headlined “Fucking For Medvedev.”

It is the first time in the 11-year history of The exile, that our newspaper has ever been censored. What’s odd about it for us is that the “Fucking For Medvedev” spread, while not exactly family-friendly, is hardly the most shocking thing we’ve ever printed; we’ve run a cover depicting a nearly-nude Putin fucking Bill Clinton from behind, another cover depicting Putin as a midget in the Hitlerjugen getting his head patted by a pleased Fuhrer, and a cover demanding that President Yeltsin “Die Already!” during one of his many illnesses.

The offending article/photo essay in the current issue covered a hardcore anti-Medvedev orgy by a performance art troupe named “Voina” (or “War”).

[Slightly less censored versions of the photos in question after the jump—they're still plenty NSFW!]

Last Friday, the troupe slipped into Moscow’s Biology Museum, stripped off their clothes, and started to fuck—like, really, genuinely fuck—on the museum floor, under a banner reading “Fuck For The Successor Medvedev.” Their “art performance” lasted about 10 minutes before museum security pounced.

It didn’t take long for the troupe to exploit their performance, posting photos on the Russian-heavy Live Journal blogosphere and mass-mailing the media. But only a few outlets picked up the story—perhaps it had something to do with all the extreme hardcore photos of a fully-pregnant woman getting nailed from behind by a pasty little bohemian, whom we see in the first few photos desperately trying to wank himself to life for the performance.

We were the first to print the story in all of its skanky, gory detail—or rather, would have been the first, until our printing company, formerly Pravda’s printing house, halted the presses because, they alleged, the spread “offended the honor of the president”—currently a crime punishable by jail in Russia—and that it was “pornographic,” which is also legally gray and restricted. They were so incensed that they threatened to destroy our files—until we reminded them that doing so would itself be a crime.

With just over an hour to change the page and get it approved, we took the files back to our office and redid page six as one giant black page, with a small white box in the middle that read: “In Loving Memory of the Vladimir Putin Era 2000-2008.”
When we delivered the new proofs to the printers, they scoured our new blackened page, nervously suspicious that we’d planted some kind of evil American hidden-meaning-bomb into that obviously ironic little eulogy.

Screenshot of The eXiled’s first and only censored spread

There’s a lot of anxiety and timidity these days in Russia, the sort that sweeps over the country with every change of power, and these guys didn’t want to be the first ones loaded onto cattle wagons and sent off to the Kolyma gold mines. Finally, confident that we’d only delivered a single layer of irony, they printed up the edition, and it was distributed without incident.

Above left: Pregnant Pussy Riot’s Nadezhda Tolokonnikova waits for her partner to achieve artistic wood

Yesterday, two Russian news channels—Ren-TV (owned by state-run Gazprom) and O2 TV, a lame Russian MTV knockoff—called pestering us about the incident, threatening to run a story about it with or without my participation. I’m not sure how they found out, because I can’t find any news about our censorship scandal on the Russian Internet or newswires, and we haven’t reported it yet either (this Radar account is the first detailed one I know of). I didn’t take their calls, because I’ve already learned firsthand what a Russian-TV smear job looks like.

I’m not sure how this is going to end for us, but the significance of this first-ever censorship of an issue of the exile is clear to all of mankind: The ghost of Stalin is back, and it’s occupying a five-foot-two vessel named “Dmitry Medvedev.”

Above: Pussy Riot’s Tolokonnikova prepares to get mounted to protest rigged election of Medvedev

 

An eXile cover that the Kremlin didn’t censor—go figure:

 

http://web.archive.org/web/20080427145851/http://radaronline.com/exclusives/2008/03/the-exile-dmitry-medvedev-censorship-sex-photos-mark-ames.php

Still like to know more? The eXile: Sex, Drugs and Libel in the New Russia co-authored by Mark Ames and Matt Taibbi (Grove).

Published in today’s edition of NSFW Corp:

Back in early July, I got an agitated email from a friend of mine from the group Faith No More right after they played a concert in Moscow with Pussy Riot. Bill, the band’s bass player, was trying to make sense of the weird experience he’d just had in Moscow:

“I don’t know if you heard, but we played in Moscow the day before yesterday, and we had Pussy Riot do a little bit for the encore. It was pretty insane…”

Jailed Pussy Riot heroine Nadezhda Tolokonnikova “Fucking For Medvedev” published in the online edition of The eXile in 2008. The print version of this article was censored by ПРЕССА, and a few months later, The eXile was closed.

Bill’s been going back and forth to Moscow for a couple of decades now, so he knows what to expect from the place better than most: he produced some early Moscow punk records, and he brought Faith No More to play Moscow at the height of the Yeltsin debauchery.

Hell, Bill even hosted the legendary punk-radical Yegor Letov in San Francisco shortly before Letov died.

So Bill understands the weirdness and menace of Russia better than most. Yet even he wasn’t prepared for Moscow’s violent reaction to Pussy Riot, much of that hostility coming from the very same scene Bill had spent years cultivating and working with.

And this is the part of the Pussy Riot story completely overlooked or dismissed by the Western media…(read more)

To read the rest of this article click here (open viewing).

Watch: Pussy Riot takes the stage during Faith No More concert, and it’s not pretty:

This article was published at Not Safe For Work Corp, where I’m acting as editor-at-large. You should subscribe http://www.nsfwcorp.com/subscribe

Still like to know more? The eXile: Sex, Drugs and Libel in the New Russia co-authored by Mark Ames and Matt Taibbi (Grove).

Published in today’s edition of NSFW Corp:

It’s been a few hours since I stormed out of the Georgetown AMC Loews cineplex. I went there to see “The Campaign”, the new Zach Galifianakis “comedy” that just opened, and I lasted almost an hour in my seat before throwing my popcorn and bolting the theater.

“The Campaign” isn’t the worst — as in terrifying scary shit-bad worst — film I’ve seen since moving back to the Free World a few years ago. That honor would have to go to “Sex and the City 2″. I lasted about 40 minutes through that film, telling myself the whole time, “If Pat Tillman could face terrorists, you can face Sex and the City 2, Ames!” over and over. Until it finally dawned on me: “Pat Tillman had it easy compared to this! Kandahar is like Club Med compared to Sex and the City 2!” and I ran screaming.

“The Campaign” is a different kettle of fish puke. There’s a weirdly unfunny flatness permeating the entire film: flat writing, flat jokes, flat directing, and above all, Zach Galifianakis’ non-presence, a flatness so flat it’s like convex comedy…

To read the rest of this article click here (open viewing).

This review of was published at Not Safe For Work Corp, where I’m acting as editor-at-large. You should subscribe http://www.nsfwcorp.com/subscribe

Still like to know more? The eXile: Sex, Drugs and Libel in the New Russia co-authored by Mark Ames and Matt Taibbi (Grove).

This piece was originally published at Not Safe For Work Corp

I’ve always hated Michael McFaul — and he don’t like me much neither.

We’ve carried on a sort of hate-hate relationship going back to the mid-1990s, when McFaul was former President Bill Clinton’s chief propagandist in Moscow, cheerfully assuring every foreign correspondent that Boris Yeltsin was the Thomas Jefferson of our day.

At my newspaper, The eXile, we called Boris Yeltsin out as the vodka-embalmed mass murderer he was, a “Walking Dead” version of the Godfather who shelled his own parliament, genocided Chechnya, and carved up the national wealth to the guys with the shiniest track suits.

McFaul didn’t like the way we reported Yeltsin’s Russia — as he wrote, “perception is reality” and Russia’s biggest problems were all the “pessimists” who didn’t dance atop the boneyard that was the Russian Federation in the 1990s. Then he called us “rapists” and got us censored from the only important Russia listserv at the time, serving all the Russia journalists, diplomats and think-tankers, at a time when Russia was still front-and-center of America’s foreign policy.

We didn’t like that. So we called McFaul a “Beigeist.” He didn’t get what we meant by “Beigeist.” So we defined the term a little more clearly, calling McFaul a “human golden retriever” who drools venom.

He got it, and really didn’t like it. So McFaul called us “fascists.” We didn’t like that, so we called McFaul a “Gillette Dry Look hairspray model” and “The Face of Evil” and “Dr. McFaulwell.” We called for the Russian government to arrest him immediately. We even blamed him for inciting racial tensions in California and for exploiting his illegal immigrant leaf blowers — you get the point.

We probably overdid it a bit. Things happen in the heat of the moment.

Ours has been an unhappy relationship, punctuated only by odd moments of schadenfreude. Like when McFaul publicly danced on The eXile’s grave when Putin’s goons shut us down and sent me snagglepussing back to the Free World a few years ago. Back then, McFaul was transitioning himself from Bush-era neocon whom nobody paid attention to, into Obama’s Russia specialist.

Like some kind of David Bowie of the think-tank world, McFaul reinvented himself through each successive wave of American Stupid — transforming himself into a woofing neocon, writing editorials calling for “regime change” during the Bush years — only to reinvent himself in 2008 as a karaoke Kissinger, wooing candidate Obama with realpolitik power-ballads. Obama wanted an amateur Kissinger, and McFaul delivered.

Through all the transformations, only one thing has remained steady: Michael McFaul’s grotesque ambition to one day rise to the post of US Ambassador to Russia, no matter what karaoke tune he has to sing or whose ass needs to be spit-shined.

Alas, this year, Michael McFaul was named US Ambassador to Russia. He’s all we’ve got protecting us from 5,000 loosely-guarded Russian nuclear missiles, and Putin’s hair-trigger.

Ambassador McFaul has nearly brought Armageddon on more than one occasion, almost always on account of his retarded understanding of the Russian language, which has become a running joke in the Russian media and a source of several near-diplomatic rows, leading us just seconds to midnight, a click away from DEFCON 1.

So it is with great pleasure and a heavy heart that I call your attention to the Hon. Ambassador Michael McFaul’s most recent diplomatic flub (h/t to the good folks at opposition-owned Newsru.com).

Earlier this month, on the eve of Independence Day, McFaul cheerfully tweeted out to his 26,000+ followers: “I’ll be in Yekaterinburg for the InnoProm Exhibition.”

Only problem is, Amb. McFaul didn’t write “Yekaterinburg.” For some reason, McFaul got the brilliant idea of replacing “Yekaterinburg” with “Yoburg” (Ёбург), meaning “Fuckberg,” or “Fuckville.”

He thought he was being colloquial and in-the-know. Instead, he was being an idiot. So the tweet from the US Ambassador to Russia cheerfully reads:

“Hey I’m heading to Fuckberg to the InnoProm Exhibition”

And with that tweet, McFaul launched a New Cold War — or as Newsru.com reported in an article headlined “Ambassador McFaul Forced To Apologize Over ‘Fuckberg’”:

“The American Ambassador to Russia, Michael McFaul, once again had to apologize for his use of Russian language, which he’s been having difficulty with lately.”

And then came the tweets.

One Russian tweeter @engineee replied earnestly:

“Michael, ‘YoBurg’ is an offensive lowlife’s word, you shouldn’t use it.”

Self-hating Russian @microzmija tweeted:

“Michael, you called that Urals shithole Sverdlovsk right!” [Sverdlovsk was the Communist-era name of Yekaterinburg.]

No doubt the most poignant tweet of all, the one favored by Newsru.com and others, came from some Russian D&D dweeb @dmitry_denb who uses an Alexander Nevsky avatar. He replied simply:

“You’re the fuckberg, MacFahk!”

Finally, @Alexey_Kovalev tweeted to McFaul in English:

“I love that US Ambassador to Russia @McFaul is referring to Yekaterinburg as Ёбург, colloquial name with horny overtones (lit. Fuckville).”

If McFaul had half a testicle left, he’d’ve tweeted back:

“Hey Borat, you know what I love? Your Third World ass renditioned to Guantanamo, with violent overtones (lit. Hell).”

But that’s not the McFaul way, dream as we might. His way is the shit-eating golden retriever that got McFaul the keys to the ambassador’s residence at Spasso House, and that same venomous golden retriever tweeted back to the suck-up:

“@Alexey_Kovalev I will never cut and paste again from another follower.The richness of the Russian laguage on Twitter continues to amaze me” [sic]

Yep, even after all these years, I can honestly say I still hate McFaul. And as long as he keeps entertaining me like this, I don’t plan to let that hate go anytime soon.

This was first published on Not Safe For Work Corp, the news magazine (with jokes) where I’m acting as editor-at-large. You should subscribe http://www.nsfwcorp.com/subscribe

Would you like to know more? Read “Mikey McFaul and the Three Bears” by John Dolan; “I, Michael McFaul, Writes Well” by Matt Taibbi; and “Der Neue McFaul” by Mark Ames.

The following article first appeared in Punch!, the pop culture iPad app, available free for download here. If you own an iPad, you should read this article at the Punch! app, which has all kinds of awesome media embedded, a quiz on Mormons vs. Scientology, video clips and great layout and so on. We don’t own iPads because you people haven’t donated yours to us, so we can only dream. For those of you who didn’t condemn themselves to journalism’s humiliating poverty—or for those of you “journalists” on the take from the Koch brothers or tobacco companies, or PHARMA, or you generally suck so badly that you’re paid well and can afford iPads—enjoy it on your iPad. While you still can.

“I intend to lay a foundation that will revolutionize the whole world.”

–Joseph Smith, Jr.

CHAPTER ONE: ‘I Suck, Please Slay Me’

When Punch! first assigned me this story — a review of A Mormon President, a DVD docudrama about Mormon founder Joseph Smith and his disastrous run for president in 1844 — I assured my editor he’d have a comic gem with timely political relevance delivered to his inbox before he could say “TK.”

I was so sure this would be one of the easiest stories I had ever knocked out that I even sent him an ironic pre-victory email labeling the assignment a “slam dunk,” my way of daring the Gods of Writer’s Block.

That was two months ago.

Now it’s two days past the final-final deadline. Here I sit, staring at a blank Microsoft Word document titled MORMON BRAINFUCK HATE HATE I SUCK PLEASE SLAY ME DRAFT-8.82c3a.docx. The last communication I had with Punch! was when I emailed a quote from Joseph Smith: “You don’t know me; you never knew my heart. No man knows my history.” It’s the epigraph that opens A Mormon President — but taken out of context all it did was scare my editor: “Why are you sending me Charlie Manson quotes, Ames? Are you threatening me?”

I didn’t have the heart to tell him I was quoting Mitt Romney’s own personal Yoda or that the thought of an upgraded version of Joseph Smith taking control of the White House should scare the shit out of secular humanists and liberal elites, who, so far, have dismissed Romney’s foundational ideology, treating it with parody or scorn, if at all.

Now that it’s well past deadline — the “post-apocalypse” in journalism terms — and I find myself in a peaceful, death-like state, I am capable of telling the tragic story about how a straight-to-DVD historical docudrama (full title: A Mormon President: Joseph Smith and the Mormon Quest for the White House) ruined the life of a promising forty-something writer named Mark Ames in the prime of his middle-youth.

But this review is about more than Mark Ames. This is about all of us. Because long after the snickering about Mormonism dies down, we are likely to wake up one November morning with a real-life “A Mormon President” of our own. And if the Mormons themselves are to be believed, it means we’re about five months away from the End Days.

Go to www.AMormonPresident.com and buy the DVD

According to a controversial Joseph Smith prophecy, when America degenerates to the point where “the Constitution hangs by a thread” — and most TV pundits agree we’re there already — at this time, a Mormon will be elected President of the United States, triggering a whole series of disaster-film plot twists: the end of the world as we know it; the overthrow of “gentile” rule; and the long-promised Second Coming of Jesus Christ. Only, instead of teleporting Himself somewhere interesting like Jerusalem, say the Mormons, Jesus will stage his comeback in Independence, Missouri.

Let me put it another way. Mitt Romney was raised to believe that if Mitt Romney is elected president, Mitt Romney will rule the world (or whatever is left of it) as the Mormon gods’ Viceroy, while Jesus Christ stumbles through tornado country, making crop circles in a corn field, or whatever it is you do there.

Go to www.AMormonPresident.com and buy the DVD

If you don’t believe me, it’s because you don’t know the operating software system Romney runs on. A slow and stupid operating system, sure, but it may soon be hooked up to about 5,000 nuclear warheads and a global empire, so ignoring it won’t save you.

It sounds too crazy to be true, I know — but by now we liberal elites should know not to trust our instincts. Look at what happened in the case of Barack Obama: rather than taking at face value his stated ideas about financial reform (Obama made Larry Summers, architect of the financial deregulation disaster, his economics brain-bug), about health care (he ran on the least progressive and most pro-industry health care plan of the three major Democratic candidates), and about the American empire (which were neocon-friendly), liberal media elites projected onto him everything they wanted him to be: an idealized secular humanist version of Obama. By dismissing the “obvious” surface of our presidential politics, the media set us up for the biggest political Obummer of the century.

That’s where this movie comes in. A Mormon President tells the story of some stupid and confused hillbillies and the boner-wielding con man who leads them to ruin. In other words, it’s about us. In January 2013.

Forget about being clever, folks: To paraphrase a line from Starship Troopers, “To fight stupid, we must become stupid.”

CHAPTER TWO: Mugged by Moroni

If it’s not clear by now, the problem with reviewing A Mormon President is this: The movie was supposed to be unintentionally funny, softball material, a 21st century version of those old “Crown” history films they used to show in my public school civics class. It was supposed to serve one purpose: To make me look like I have talent. It would play the Washington Generals to my Harlem Globetrotters.

But I done figured wrong. As the story of Joseph Smith’s 1844 run for president unfolded into something weirder and scarier than I had bargained for, I started to realize it didn’t matter if the movie was unintentionally funny or not. Like it or not, my smug lack of curiosity about Mitt Romney’s religious identity was crumbling before a straight-to-DVD production. I found myself, as it were, Mugged by Moroni.

Go to www.AMormonPresident.com and buy the DVD

Now that I know a little more about Mitt Romney 1.0 —  that is, Joseph Smith, Jr., who was not only the first Mormon, but the first Mormon to run for president — I’m not finding much to laugh at anymore.

Let me cut to the quick here and make things clear, in case I’m starting to sound like the Mel Gibson character in Conspiracy Theory.

First of all, although Joseph Smith’s candidacy was equal parts tragedy and farce (in a Tommy Boy sort of way), he did offer a template for a future Mormon president with the example he set as ruler over the township of Nauvoo, Illinois, a unique post granted him via special city charter by the Illinois governor after the Mormons’ cruel expulsion from Missouri in 1838.

Within a couple of years after settling in Nauvoo — a city whose population quickly grew to parity with Chicago’s — Smith transformed his fiefdom into a sort of Mormon Bantustan. He was Mayor, and Chief Justice, and got away with calling himself “King, Priest, and Ruler over Israel on Earth.” Creepiest of all, he led the Nauvoo Legion, a unit roughly one-third the size of the total United States military. Not one for half measures, Smith gave himself the rank of “Lt. General,” the highest rank held by an American military officer since George Washington.

The Nauvoo, Illinois Mormon Temple that Mitt Romney’s great-great-great-grandfather helped build

In 1841, Lt. Gen. Joseph Smith displayed his might by leading a huge military parade. One historian interviewed for A Mormon President compares the procession to “a May Day parade in the Soviet Union during the Cold War. And this terrified a number of people, who, at that point, really switched gears and said, ‘These people are dangerous and we need to protect ourselves.’”

The grand martial display marked how far the Mormons had come in a short time. Three years earlier, Smith and his followers had felt the full force of an official order signed by Missouri governor Lilburn Boggs, which went like this: “The Mormons must be treated as enemies, and must be exterminated, or driven from the state, if necessary, for the public peace. Their outrages are beyond all description.”

Before watching A Mormon President, I knew something about how the Missourians had massacred the Mormons prior to running them out of that godforsaken state. What I didn’t know was that a Mormon was the one who had apparently started all the extermination talk. The movie shows a perennial second banana, Sidney Rigdon — who is played by a Billy Crystal look-alike in an Abe Lincoln beard — making a speech in which he threatens Missouri’s “gentiles” with “a war of extermination.”

Here’s the thing about extermination threats: When you’re the weird little minority in a sea of armed, whiskey-guzzling Christians, it is generally a bad strategy to speak publicly of your intention to wipe out everybody else.

The Missourians were slow to react. There’s something about suicidal cultists that makes the sure-to-win side hesitate. (Are they hiding something we don’t know about? There’s got to be some angle we’re not catching!) Gov. Boggs grew weary of waiting and signed the order. The locals went to work massacring the men, the womenfolk, and the children, before finally driving other Mormons out of the state. Smith, Rigdon, and others landed in a Missouri jail… from which they eventually made their escape.

Safe at last in Nauvoo, Illinois, Smith made a riverside prophecy that the Missouri governor would “die by violent hands within one year.” Which brings us to the thug who served as head of Smith’s security detail: Orrin Porter Rockwell. In the film, he resembles a 19th century Hells Angel biker, if a little meaner and crazier. Soon after the boss’s prophecy, Rockwell slipped back over to Missouri and… next thing you know… someone is blasting Gov. Boggs with four shots — two balls of buckshot in the neck, two in the head — leaving him all but dead.

Porter Rockwell: The First Mormon Biker

A couple of years later, Smith’s thoughts turned national. He established an inner circle called “the Council of 50,” which was “like an Ollie North thing,” as one historian describes it in A Mormon President. This group ran Smith’s campaign and planned his takeover of power, with the idea of helping him run things from inside the White House.

In his final display of power — the one that led to his downfall — Smith declared martial law in his principality and used his mighty Nauvoo Legion to destroy the Nauvoo Expositor‘s printing press in reaction to the newspaper’s having dared criticize his polygamy and power-lust. This led to his being thrown into the pokey once again… where he soon found himself shot and bayoneted by an armed mob. Before meeting his grisly demise, he offered up the White Horse Prophecy, a revelation that he (or some worthy Mormon in years to come) was pre-ordained to become president at a time when the “Constitution is hanging by a thread as fine as a silk fiber.”

The prophecy is not accepted as church doctrine but remains part of Mormon lore. Adam Christing, the director of A Mormon President, explained it to me this way: “It’s just like in our time. The prophecy says, ‘The government is in disarray. The Constitution is going to be hanging by a thread, and the gentiles are going to screw it up so bad that it’s going to take God’s people to save the day.’ I do think there’s been a tiny underground hope in Mormon Land, if you will, that Romney could be the fulfillment of that White Horse Prophecy. Like a knight-in-shining-armor thing.”

Romney, a seventh-generation Mormon who has served as a Latter-day Saint bishop, has distanced himself from the founder’s theocratic talk, just as he has repudiated plural marriage. “That’s not official church doctrine,” he said of the White Horse Prophecy in a 2011 Salt Lake Tribune interview. “There are a lot of things that are speculation and discussion by church members and even church leaders that aren’t official church doctrine. I don’t put that at the heart of my religious belief.”

But Christing told me he believes Romney has taken a secret oath pledging his loyalty first and foremost to his church: “There are, still today, very secret ceremonies in the Mormon temple, which Romney has participated in — virtually all of those, including something called the Oath of Consecration, where he consecrates his money, his time, his talents. His whole life, really.”

Here is the Oath of Consecration:

“You and each of you covenant and promise before God, angels, and these witnesses at this altar, that you do accept the law of consecration as contained in this, The Book of Doctrine and Covenants, in that you do consecrate yourselves, your time, talents, and everything with which the Lord has blessed you, or with which he may bless you, to the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, for the building up of the kingdom of God on the earth and for the establishment of Zion.”

“There was a time when sharing this info was dangerous,” Christing said in an email. “Now, it’s probably on Google. To me, the interesting thing is that the oath of consecration is specifically directed to the Mormon church (not God).”

Go to www.AMormonPresident.com and buy the DVD

CHAPTER THREE: Joseph Smith’s Game

Joseph Smith’s eternal second-banana and VP ticket mate, Sidney Rigdon, struggling to relieve himself in his outhouse as fellow Mormons cheer his bowels on

And then there is the matter of polygamy. By the time he was murdered, Joseph Smith had amassed 33 wives, eleven of whom were married and still living with their husbands. They ranged in age from 14 to roughly 60, according to an expert interviewed in the film.

Christing, who was raised in the second largest Mormon branch, the Reorganized Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints (RLDS), until he was 14 years old (and hasn’t been a member since), treats Smith’s polygamy not just as a historical quirk but as an element of the behaviors we might associate with a sociopathic cult leader: “When Joseph reads to his wife Emma the ‘revelation’ from God instructing Joseph to marry as many wives as he can, he reads her a ‘letter’ from God telling his wife that if she doesn’t accept it, she’ll be damned. So if you believe that Smith was the prophet — basically he’s saying to his wife, ‘If you don’t believe this, you’re going to hell.’”

Emma wasn’t the only one thus coerced. Christing adds: “Imagine if you’re an 18-year-old woman. You’ve maybe left your family, or come with one family member from England, and you’ve arrived on a boat at New Orleans, and you come up the Mississippi River, and you get off the boat in Nauvoo, and there’s Brigham Young and Joseph Smith. And Joseph says, ‘God gave me a revelation to take plural wives, and if I don’t, an angel of God will kill me. An angel appeared to me with a drawn sword, and he’ll kill me.’ That’s a little bit of pressure to get from the ‘prophet,’ you know?”

The journey from England to Illinois was the one taken by Mitt Romney’s great-great-great grandfather, Miles Romney, along with his wife, Elizabeth, from the miserable factory town of Preston, England, to Illinois. Miles, an architect, was tasked with assisting the construction of the Nauvoo Temple.

One of the interviewees in A Mormon President is a gorgeous Mormon with a pre-Raphaelite face draped with perfectly silk dark hair. Her name is Kara Lyn Roundy. When she speaks of Joseph Smith, she lights up: “All I know is that there’s one prophet at the head of the church who has been given the keys to the holy priesthood. And he has been ordained by God…. It is so key for people to understand: There is only one Church on the face of the planet that has all the keys of the priesthood, and that is in the church of Jesus Christ of Latter Day Saints.” When this MMILF gushes over Joseph Smith, you want to agree with her. You might even want to know what his secret was. The more one learns about his shameless pick-up techniques, the more one realizes there’s a Mormon version of The Game just waiting to be revealed to shy nerds everywhere.

On the topic of Mitt Romney, she says: “I think Mitt Romney is brilliant. He is a briiiiiiilliant businessman. I mean, he turns businesses around. He’s the first guy who took charge of the Olympics, profited $70 million.”

CUT TO: Still image of a smiling Romney holding the Olympic flame.

CUT TO: Still image of Romney clutching gold medals as the camera zooms in, Ken Burns-style, on his smile.

“I mean, who’s ever done that?” Roundy says. “That’s the kind of guy I want running my country.”

A Mormon President has other funny moments. Over a PBS-ready piano soundtrack, experts on Mormonism try to persuade the viewer that, despite his status as prophet, Joseph Smith had a “regular Joe” side. “He was the kind of guy who would get down on the floor and wrestle with kids,” one historian says.

CUT TO: Handsome Actor Guy With Suspiciously Romney-Like Facial Structure, in 1830s frontiersman costume, rolling through a meadow with kids.

Whoa, Amber Alert! Try that one again, fellas.

A Utah-dad type tells the camera: “Joseph Smith wouldn’t be someone I’d want to live next door to me.”

Wait a minute — can you say that in a Mormon movie?

Another interviewee, credibly silver-haired, says: “He was all of the things that a classic Old Testament prophet said they were — and Joseph is saying, ‘I am the same kind of prophet.’ And if it’s true, it’s scary. And if it’s false, Joseph Smith is a charlatan.”

So this movie isn’t really the Mormon Schlock I had expected — or had hoped — it would be. But all this is mere backdrop to its main focus: Smith’s run for the presidency, a subject that the voice-over correctly points out “has never been told before.” It is a story I knew nothing about, and cared even less about, until A Mormon President forced me to.

Go to www.AMormonPresident.com and buy the DVD

CHAPTER FOUR: The Outlaw and the Insider

Smith’s presidential campaign is not only relevant to our looming tragicomedy of 2013, but also the perfect E-Z to swallow entrée into the bizarre and unnerving nexus between Mormonism and presidential politics — an area many liberals would prefer to avoid, as if merely bringing up future-President Romney’s Mormonism reveals a lack of faith in the American system, or maybe even a cryptic intolerance.

In early 1844 Smith announced he was running as the “outsider” candidate of his day. “Tell the people we have had Whig and Democrats Presidents long enough,” he declared. “We care not a fig for Whig or Democrat; they are both alike to us.”

Sounds familiar, don’t it? In fact, it’s so familiar it’s kind of humiliating. These days, our version of the “he-gets-it” political analyst is one who takes pride in “seeing through the discredited left-right, Republocrat bullshit” — which makes such a pundit nothing more than warmed-over Mormon Prophet meat.

At least Smith had a few snappy lines when he went after the hacks of his time. He surveyed the field of candidates in 1844 — twiddle-dee-dee Whigs like Henry Clay and incumbent President John Tyler; twiddle-dee-dum Democrats like ex-President Martin van Buren, John C. Calhoun, and dark-horse James K. Polk — and he scowled: “I mourn for the depravity of the world; I despise the imbecility of American statesmen; I detest shrinkage of candidates for office, from pledges and responsibility.”

The white male American electorate in those days was roughly evenly divided between Whig voters and Democrat voters. Smith planned to leverage that electoral split to his advantage. The parties seemed incapable of addressing the Big Issues of slavery and territorial expansion (i.e., admitting Texas into the Union). It was understood that taking a stand on slavery could lead to civil war; and taking a stand on expansion could lead to war with Mexico, war with Britain, civil war, or some combination thereof.

The establishment parties’ tiptoeing around the major questions of the day created an opportunity for a maverick like Smith, who pledged to rid the nation of slavery through “voluntary” abolition by Southern slave states (which may bring to mind Romney’s plan to solve illegal immigration by flicking on the super-secret voluntary self-deporting gene in Mexicans). Smith also advocated the re-establishment of the national bank (which may recall Romney’s role as the biggest booster of the Federal Reserve among the Republican candidates). Smith, further, wasn’t shy about saying he favored the annexation of Texas and the Oregon territories, as well as Canada and Mexico (not to mention all the wives inhabiting those far-flung places… which makes one consider Romney’s grim and aggressive monogamy, which seems bound to explode in ways that could make us all rue the day Abraham Lincoln signed into law anti-polygamy legislation…).

Crawling further out onto a political limb, Smith demanded radical penal reform, calling for the release of all inmates but murderers and the abolition of debtors’ prisons (and this is a bug in the Operating System that may be ignored, except that it highlights the difference between Smith, an outlaw, and Romney, an insider).

So far, I’m making Joseph Smith’s politics out to be more respectable than they really were. The story of his run for president really gets its start with his founding of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints. Weird events accelerate at a parabolic rate, right up to his murder-by-cuckold-mob in June 1844.

Joseph Smith started peddling his very own Anti-Depressant for scared and lonely frontier settlers in 1830. It really was “new & improved” — a re-branded version of Judeo-Christianity made especially for the Second Great Awakening, a time of competing religious products that offered hysterical reinterpretations of the same damn book about the same actions taking place in the same place on the other side of the globe. According to a Smith “revelation,” America itself was the new Promised Land. He got his followers to prepare a landing pad for Jesus in what would be the hometown of Harry S. Truman, the only human being ever to drop the atom bomb.

Coincidence? It better well fucking be, or we are gentile toast, folks.

Go to www.AMormonPresident.com and buy the DVD

Things get scary in A Mormon President when an “ex-Mormon pastor” named Shawn McCraney says: “I absolutely believe that the [Mormon] church today is the living embodiment of everything Joseph Smith represented. He was the seed; they are the fruit.” Meaning: Mitt Romney is The Fruit. I know it doesn’t sound right, saying that — especially considering that Mormons were the big reason why Prop 8 passed in California — but there it is.

Then the director of the Mormonism Research Ministry, standing before the monstrous LDS temple in Salt Lake City, tells the viewer: “The Mormon Church’s basic premise is that all of the churches are wrong, that their creeds are an abomination, and that their professors are corrupt, and that really there are no true churches on the face of the earth, except for the LDS church.”

Holy shit! No wonder Mormons are the nicest people in America: They hate our fucking guts!

CHAPTER FIVE: The Director’s Tale

The Reorganized Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints (RLDS) was made possible by Joseph Smith’s wife, Emma Smith, and his son, Joseph Smith III. After Smith was killed-by-mob, some of the Mormons broke away from Smith’s successor, the many-wived Brigham Young, and founded the second largest Mormon church (out of some 400 branches) today, the one Adam Christing grew up in—and then left.

Christing wears many hats: Filmmaker, entrepreneur, magician, amateur historian, philosopher, corporate events speaking pro, and… standup comic.

One doesn’t usually associate Mormons with funny, but that just shows how little we “gentiles” know. “I do think I’m very funny, in terms of my standup show,” Christing told me. “But I gravitate more toward philosophy. I also own the domain — believe it or not – themeaningoflife.com. I actually lost well over $50,000 trying to develop that site, so right now it’s in limbo.” When it comes to his stage act, Christing is the Shecky Greene of ex-Reorganized Mormons. A sampling of his material:

“I was just in Los Angeles, and I was speaking at this animal rights barbecue, and…”

“I’d like to go to assertiveness training class. First I need to check with my wife.”

He has the comic pause down perfectly. He is able to light a given joke’s delayed-action fuse and wait for the laughter to ripple through the crowd. His demo reel is a thing of beauty. It looks like it was lifted directly from an old SCTV episode, with Christing as a Latter-day Bobby Bittman.

My man, Adam Christing

In 1990, he founded Clean Comedians, to promote a brand of standup comedy perfect for corporate events, in that it has zero profanity. The organization also offers its clients a money-back guarantee: “If it isn’t funny, we’ll refund your money.” One fan was President George W. Bush, who was so blown away by Clean Comedians Bush impersonators, Steve Bridges, that he teamed up with him at a White House Correspondents’ Dinner.

In 2005, Christing sold Clean Comedians and soon started plowing roughly $350,000 into A Mormon President, which he did not complete until 2011 (and is still tinkering with today, in preparation for further screenings). “I’ve been obsessed with the story of Joseph Smith since I was young,” he said. “I’ve got a huge library of everything related to Joseph Smith. And the more I read, the more complex he became to me. Is this guy a fraud? Does he really think he’s a prophet?”

He took no money from any particular group: “I didn’t want to make a puff piece. The Mormon Church, in my opinion — if you go to the Temple, and you watch one of the films in the Visitor Center, they’re not going to show you his polygamy, they’re not going to show you his politics or what he did to the Nauvoo Expositor. And those were very huge factors in his life. So you won’t know, ‘Why did anyone want to kill this guy?’ On the other hand, if you watch certain Evangelical Christian films, they make him seem like a monster, like the film The God Makers. I feel like that’s way over the top. This guy was a wonderful human being in many ways: very charismatic, loved children, very generous. But he also had these other aspects to his personality — the secrecy stuff, and an enormous ego… I just wanted to tell the most accurate account of his life that I could, from multiple perspectives. And that’s why I didn’t take money from anybody…. The Mormon Church didn’t finance it, no Evangelical ministry financed it. Just individuals who wanted to make an accurate film. And I think we succeeded.”

CHAPTER SIX: Romney’s Twisted Roots

Some Mormons hold that Smith was “assassinated” in a “conspiracy.” The theory first made the rounds in The Carthage Conspiracy, a book published in 1975, at the height of Watergate and Church Committee hearings, a time when such theories were briefly recognized as political realities. Getting murdered in a conspiracy involving powerful Whig Party bosses is a more romantic way for a prophet to go than being gunned down by drunken cuckolds in blackface as you try to squeeze your way out a second-story window.

The lack of grassy knoll or programmed patsy seems not to matter to Christing and others who believe. “Absolutely, absolutely,” the filmmaker said, when I asked him if Smith was the victim of a conspiracy. “With the J.F.K. thing, the speculation gets pretty wild. I think it’s a little simpler with Joseph Smith.”

Almost everyone within a 100 mile radius of Smith wanted this frontier Charlie Manson dead. Not because he wanted to bring about world peace (as J.F.K. conspiracy theorists like Oliver Stone allege), but rather because he seduced their wives and fucked their sense of normalcy. An assassination-by-conspiracy, however, renders the death more significant and less mundane.

While Mormon historical revisionism attempts to turn Smith’s embarrassing Last Act into the stuff of historical tragedy, two generations of Romneys have been revising and refining his run for the presidency, undoing Smith’s “mistakes.” Before the rise of the current presumptive Republican nominee, the closest LDS member to finish what the first Mormon had started was probably Mitt’s dad, Gov. George W. Romney, who ran as the moderate Rockefeller Republican candidate, to the left of Richard Nixon and Ronald Reagan, in 1968.

Back then, the surface reality in America had become so weird and violent that nothing in Mormonism really shocked anyone. If it turned out that George W. Romney wore “Mormon underwear” (the subject of quips made by satirists-in-chief Jon Stewart and Stephen Colbert), it might even have won him a few votes. Another difference: In ’68, the Republicans had yet to mold and fired up the Christian Right bloc. The Evangelicals, after all, are the ones most put off by Mormonism. They take its polytheism to heart, although they’ve learned to keep quiet about it, except in online forums like Free Republic.

The Romneys are to Mormons as Mayflower families are to America as a whole: After his great-great grandfather helped erect the Nauvoo Temple, where Smith held his military parade in 1841, Mitt’s great-grandfather was born among this original LDS band. After Smith’s murder, the church split. Most followed Smith’s pro-polygamy-wingman, Brigham Young, to the Utah Territory; a small number stayed with Smith’s widow, Emma Smith, and founded the breakaway Reorganized Church of Latter-Day Saints, the anti-polygamy branch that Christing was later born into.

The Romneys went with the polygamists. And they stayed with the polygamists. In fact, you couldn’t pry polygamy from the Romney clan with a crowbar if you tried. Abraham Lincoln, father of the Republican Party, certainly did his best, when he signed the 1862 Anti-Bigamy Act, which outlawed plural marriage in U.S. territories. But that didn’t stop Miles P. Romney, Mitt’s great-grandfather, from racking up five wives.

Another notable Republican, Sen. George Edmunds, made life even harder for frontier swingers with the Edmunds Anti-Polygamy Act of 1882, which pushed Mitt’s great-granddad deep into the hinterlands, wives in tow. By the time the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints itself renounced polygamy in 1890, Miles P. Romney and his brood hightailed it to Mexico, feds on their tail, crossing the Rio Grande as voluntarily as an illegal Mexican immigrant might under President Romney in years to come.

Folks didn’t take kindly to Mitt’s great-grandpa, as this editorial in the Apache Chief more than suggests: “Hang a few of their polygamist leaders such as… Romney,” the newspaper wrote. The piece went on to single out Miles P. Romney as “a mass of putrid pus and rotten goose pimples; a skunk, with the face of a baboon, the character of a louse, the breath of a buzzard, and the record of a perjurer and common drunkard.”

And that’s the final edited version! Imagine the early drafts!

Miles and his wives settled in Mexico. The Romney clan remained there long enough for Mitt’s own father, George W. Romney, to be born in Chihuahua, meaning Mitt’s dad grew up with one grandpa and a whole bunch of grandmas. He went on to serve as the 43rd governor of Michigan. Because of his provenance, “birther” talk abounded during his run for president.

If you look at the refinement of Mormon presidential candidates… from Joseph Smith, through George W. Romney, up to Mitt today… you can almost watch time-motion political calibration evolve to match the Zeitgeist of America. Smith, the consummate outsider candidate in 1844, drew too much attention to the Mormon stuff and ended up the victim of lynch-mob murder. George W. Romney started out as the centrist candidate in the year 1968, only to make the mistake of saying in a television interview that he had been “brainwashed” into supporting the Vietnam war by American diplomats and military officials. That off-the-cuff quote sank his chances.

By now, the Mormon President Project has been perfected. Mitt stands as an empty reflection of an American Winner. He’s the corporate jock with the gray temples, the chiseled features, and the starched dickishness most people expect from their bosses. This is a country that made a hit reality show out of an asshole firing people — and that is the electorate counted on by the latest Joseph Smith upgrade.

It is because he has so skillfully and aggressively made himself all things to all Establishment-center-righties that A Mormon President may be the clearest window into Mitt’s soul. For me, one peek was enough to send me loading up on canned foods and planning my move to an undisclosed location near Mormon Zion. Because when Mitt Romney becomes the Mormon President foretold by Smith, and he sends those bombs into Iran to herald the start of the Thousand Year Mormon Rule, and Jesus teleports down to that Missouri cornfield to freak everyone out with his crop circles — I want to be ready. I don’t want some cheery clean-cut Mormon baptizing my bones after I’m dead. If Romney wins, I figure I’ve got two months to get baptized and make myself into one of the 13 million who rules over the rest of you 7 billion fools.

Note: This article has been corrected to show that Adam Christing is no longer a member of the Reorganized Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-Day Saints, and that Sidney Rigdon was not one of the RLDS co-founders with Emma Smith and Joseph Smith III.

Would you like to know more? Go visit the website for “A Mormon President” and buy Adam Christing’s docu-drama already. Also check out Adam Christing’s personal website www.adamchristing.com  it’s a hoot!

Still like to know more? The eXile: Sex, Drugs and Libel in the New Russia co-authored by Mark Ames and Matt Taibbi (Grove).

“If you sit quietly at the edge of a river, eventually you will see the bodies of your enemies float by.”

—Mark “Chopper” Read

Last autumn, Andrew Breitbart picked a fight with me. Breitbart bragged to the world about how he was going to destroy me. Breitbart went after me on behalf of the Koch oligarchy, who’d launched a multimillion-dollar PR counter-offensive to smear journalists who investigated them, including Jane Mayer of the New Yorker. Breitbart got the contract on me, and he had no doubt in his little pea brained mind he was going to destroy me. Breitbart was so sure he was going to ruin me, he bragged about it to everyone. He even told a journalist to tell Taibbi, “Breitbart is about to destroy your former eXile partner Mark Ames.” He was gloating in-advance. Then the very morning he attacked me, I hit back. And he tucked tail and fled like a bitch.

Now Andrew Breitbart is dead. Gee, whod’ya think won that little war?

Tough question: Maybe we should ask Breitbart what he thinks. Oh shit, dang, turns out I can’t ask Breitbart. He’s, well—he’s not doing well, dealing with those “natural causes” and all.

Ah-HAH-HAH-HAH-HA! “I feeeeel good/ nah-nah-nah-nah-nah-nah/I knew that I would! So good! So fine!” Sh’mona!

You know, in the days before bloated West Hollywood trolls like Breitbart could claim macho warrior status merely by carrying someone else’s water and publishing someone else’s PR packages—back in the rugged old days, if a fascist pig picked a fight with a rival, the way they decided who won and who lost was pretty simple: The guy who died lost. The guy who lives, wins.

Gosh, I guess that means… I won.

Sucks to be you, Andrew. Not that the subject “you” or the verb “to be” in the present active tense applies to the decomposing lump of jelly formerly known as Breitbart or anything.

“Hey Mark Ames, Andrew Breitbart just got his sorry dead ass handed to him! Where’re you gonna go to celebrate?”

For some reason, my fellow Americans are too squeamish, too hooked on false pieties, to openly, honestly gloat about Breitbart’s hilarious death-by-driveway, and stomp joyfully on that rat-fucker’s warm grave. Even the few edgy mavericks willing to admit they’re happy to see Breitbart dead, including my old partner Taibbi, for some reason ruin their gloats by interjecting paragraph after paragraph, tweet after tweet publicly justifying their death-gloat with “He would want it this way” or “He did the same thing”—um, who really gives a fuck about what Breitbart would want? He’s dead. His feelers aren’t hurt. He’s dead and done. And good riddance.

Let’s be honest: Even when it comes to right-wing hit-men, Breitbart was never that good. Or even interesting. He was a desperate self-pitying hack, a second-rate McCarthyite, his spite fueled by thwarted celebrity ambition. Like Dennis Miller, another failure who found a second life as a Murdoch monkey after getting run out of the Monday Night Football booth as the worst failure in sports announcing history. Now Dennis Miller will never have to face the rigors of free-market comedy competition again; he’s now protected by the right-wing, so long as he carries their water.

Breitbart never even rated with a hack like Dennis Miller. He couldn’t act; he couldn’t write. He could only peddle pro-oligarchy hate with a convincing bloated-faced froth. He performed public executions, ordered by the oligarchs; in his Salieri-like little mind, he convinced himself his PR hit-jobs were performance art. I remember when the right-wing used to produce some really formidable hate-mongers, but Breitbart was a Little Leaguer who lucked into a decadent period on the Right. He only stood out in our time because the American Right is so degenerate and feeble. Breitbart knew it too. An old friend of mine who works in one of the NewsCorp outlets told me that just a few months ago, Breitbart was at the NewsCorp pub across from their mid-town New York headquarters, holding a beer, drunk and sweaty, loudly boasting, “The thing people don’t understand about me is—I’m a performance artist. You see? But people don’t get that about me, they totally misunderstand me. I’m a performance artist, everything I do is performance art.” My friend said it was painfully embarrassing to listen to, typical pampered pretentious Los Angeles male bimbo talk…but coming from Breitbart, you’d expect something more formidable.

So did I, frankly, when I knew he was coming after me. I expected a healthy, long, drag-em-down war with the fat fuck. But as soon as I responded to Breitbart’s attack on me, using his goggle-eyed waffengeek Joel B. Pollak (Harvard Law, ’99) as his mercenary–as soon as Breitbart saw I hit back, he snagglepussed away, exit stage left. The guys from Media Bistro were as surprised and disappointed as I was that Breitbart pussed out and fled at the first whiff of gunpowder.

Breitbart was not used to people fighting back. A classic coward. A bitch who couldn’t handle his drugs, or much of anything as it turns out. And a moron: His attack against me relied on a bitter anti-Semitic felon named Jim Goad, who was jailed for beating up his girlfriend, breaking her eye socket, and biting her thumb. Goad attacked her because she exposed online that Goad had a hair transplant, a nose job… and  she threatened to reveal “every secret in his past: his sexual history [which would explain the homophobia]…and that he wasn’t white trash at all.” See, Goad, like Breitbart, is also a performance artist, only he pretends he’s a Confederate hick. Goad fed Breitbart all of his hilarious smear-material about Johnny Chen, then for weeks trolled me by email and on the site bragging that my life was about to be destroyed.

The ex-girlfriend of Breitbart researcher Jim Goad

Yes folks, it’s really that pathetic and lowball comedy—so sad too, so much rank degeneracy in this late, dark stage of the once-impressive American Empire.

It’s as Gene Wolfe wrote: “The armies of this age are weak.”

But Breitbart wasn’t even an army. He was a malevolent troll, a blathering water balloon who popped at the first poke. He went down easier and quicker than Saddam’s army.

It is fitting that Breitbart’s father-in-law, Orson Bean, got the news first. Orson Bean was a victim of a Breitbart-like smear attack in the 1950s—a right-wing pro-corporate smear machine called AWARE, Inc! (a sort of Big Government of its day) smeared Breitbart’s father-in-law when he was elected to a top post in a union, the American Federation of Television and Radio Artists. Yes, Breitbart’s father-in-law was a union man. Was, anyway—then he was smeared as a “Communist” and was blacklisted from Hollywood, his career destroyed. It must have pained him to know that his daughter married the same sort of vermin that ruined his life. Maybe that’s why Orson Bean, late in life, became an anti-gay supporter of Prop 8. He must have enjoyed the news about the corpse on the sidewalk as much as the rest of us.

Andrew Breitbart went to war with me. I won. Breitbart lost.

Game over, Breitbart.

Excuse me while I take a victory dump on Andrew Breitbart’s memory.

Would you like to know more? Read Mark Ames’ account of the late Andrew Breitbart’s initial attack: “Andrew Breitbart Attacks Exiled Editor Mark Ames!…Hires Failed Teabag Republican To Investigate The Great ‘Who Is Johnny Chen?’ Conspiracy” and the follow-up: “Breitbart Hijinx Update! Ace Reporter Joel B. Pollak Knows What A Proxy Is!”. Also, read about Breitbart ace researchers and libertarian sleuths in “Jim Goad and Gavin McInnes Beg Mark Ames: ‘Answer Me, Please?’”

Mark Ames is the author of Going Postal: Rage, Murder and Rebellion from Reagan’s Workplaces to Clinton’s Columbine and co-author with Matt Taibbi of The eXile: Sex, Drugs and Libel in the New Russia.

Click the cover & buy the book!

Mormon Jacuzzi? Nope, it’s Ayn Rand’s soul’s salvation

As readers of The eXiled know, we operate a leading Washington DC political PR firm, “Our Founding Fathers Global Strategies LLC”, specializing in crisis-management and strategic communications for our negative-net-worth clientele. “Our Founding Fathers GS LLC” has devised a comeback plan for Mitt Romney to reignite his flagging campaign, which we offer gratis, pro bono.

We call our 1-point comeback campaign “Brigham Shrugs” and it boils down to this:

“Baptize Ayn Rand, already!”

This crazy baglady is “Going Joseph Smith”

The Mormon baptism-of-the-dead process is pretty painless and E-Z. Here’s a description of how Mormons baptize the dead. We recommend you  play that song from Ghost by the Righteous Brothers while reading this description, it’s all so moving ‘n’ spiritual:

BAPTISM FOR THE DEAD

Perhaps the most striking feature inside a Mormon temple is the large baptismal font, large enough to accommodate several people standing waist-deep in water. The font rests on the backs of twelve life-size sculpted oxen in a special room. It is here that baptisms for the dead are performed. The proxies are usually a group of teen-age Mormons who have traveled from their homes in a group for a temple excursion. Dressed in white, they line up to enter the waters one by one to be immersed by the officiators with the short baptismal prayer: “Having authority given me of Jesus Christ, I baptize you for and in behalf of N. N., who is dead, in the name of the Father, and of the Son, and of the Holy Ghost. Amen.” The name of the dead person is read from a list to the officiator just before the immersion. One proxy may be baptized quickly in succession for ten or fifteen dead people. After the baptisms, two other officiators confirm the newly baptized dead persons as members of the Mormon church and confer upon them the gift of the Holy Ghost, by placing their hands upon the head of each proxy, with a similar short pronouncement. Hundreds of such baptisms and confirmations can be performed in a few hours. It is an efficient, production-line operation.

Efficiency and production-line baptisms of the dead. Those words are music to Ayn’s dead ears.

This gentleman’s sign should read “Who Is Joseph Smith?” Mitt, this is your moment!

Would you like to know more? Read Mark Ames’ “Atlas Shrieked: Ayn Rand’s First Love Was A Sadistic Serial Killer Who Dismembered Little Girls” and listen to Mark Ames’ radio interview “The Fountainheadbanger”.

Adam Curtis, the British filmmaker whose many great films and blog posts for the BBC we’ve been ramming down our readers’ throats (in the parlance of our times) lo these past few years, has a new piece about Russian politics, punk and avant-garde that is a must-read. It’s the only work I’ve ever read that makes sense of Edward Limonov—the former eXile columnist and leader of the radical opposition—and places Limonov and his Kremlin nemesis, Vladislav Surkov, in the context of Russia’s post-Communist politics, and Russia’s wild punk rock avant-garde.

It’s rare, as in “non-existent” rare, to read a Westerner who grasps the surface barbarism and extremism of Russian politics and art, and rarer that they can place Limonov’s role in it—Curtis manages this feat, and it’s quite an ambitious piece for a blog post. Middlebrows have spent the past couple of decades trying to fit their favorite worthless narrative frame over post-Soviet Russia—Weimar Germany, post-war West Germany, Nazi Germany, the anti-Germany—and even though none of those silly comparisons ever explained anything to anyone, they never tired of using them to misunderstand Russia. One of those cliche-peddling middlebrows who peddled the whole line of bad references and historical analogies is our old nemesis Michael McFaul—recently named the US Ambassador to Russia.

Which begs the ol’ question: “If yer so smart, why ain’t you Ambassador?”

Yeah, well, Joshua Foust is winning too.

Back to Curtis: After tracing the rise of Russia’s punk/maximalist avant-garde, Curtis introduces Limonov the political radical, and Yegor Letov, the (now deceased) god of Russian punk:

One of the first members of the National Bolshevik Party was the punk legend Yegor Letov – leader of GrOb (he was member number 4). Then Sergey Kuryokhin – the leader of the Popular Mechanics band joined and the party soon became a home to many members of the 1980s avant garde music scene.

You can watch some footage of Letov playing at an NBP rally here.

Together they reached back into the past – and borrowed, as punk had done, from fascist and revolutionary aesthetics (and even further – both Limonov and Letov idolised Mayakovsky), in order to invent dramatic ways of confronting contemporary smug westernised culture. They also associated with some very nasty people who took nationalism to racist and xenophobic extremes.

To western liberals who want to spread democracy round the world someone like Limonov is a frightening alien because he is reawakening the dangerous force of nationalism. But he in turn sees western liberals as fools who have been duped, and are really the unwitting agents of a corrupt economic global elite. Limonov believes that the only way to confront that corruption is to harness a force that appeals to the mass of the people.

Here are some glimpses of Limonov and his party on a march called by the communist party in 1997 as President Yeltsin was letting the oligarchs loot Russia – Limonov’s young supporters mingling with the old communists. One of the National Bolshevik Party banners has a fantastic slogan.

RUSSIA IS EVERYTHING
EVERYTHING ELSE IS NOTHING

But there was another route that this generation took.

The key figure is a man called Vladislav Surkov. He is half-Russian, half-Chechen. He was born in the provinces, but like all the others he came to Moscow in the 1980s.

And this is where Curtis’ post gets even more interesting, original–and deadly accurate.

A day in the life of Edward Limonov: Outside a Moscow court

Reading Adam Curtis’ piece brought back a lot of memories: The first GrOb concert I went to in Moscow in 1993 with Dr. Dolan and some of my Russian banker friends (they were graduates of the journalism and literary institutes but went into banking for the same reason we now have to), a concert that quickly devolved into a riot, OMON troops firing shotguns to scare the punks, pummeling them with truncheons (Vova, my banker buddy, saved me from an OMONets who was running up behind me with his truncheon cocked over his head), the punks charging at the OMONtsi and setting a tramvai car on fire on its tracks as their one riot trophy…

Curtis’ article also reminded me of a strange meeting I had in 2000, when Taibbi and I were in the US promoting our book, The eXile: Sex, Drugs and Libel in the New Russia. We met with a recently-retired American intelligence official who fed us some stories about yet more foul corruption that Clinton, Gore and their investment banker friends were mixed up in in the Yeltsin Clusterfuck that the Clinton/Rubin people were so deeply involved in, and criminally culpable in. Towards the end of our lunch, the mysterious, extremely grim retired intel official got even more grim and and serious, and told us to keep an eye on Vladislav Surkov, the Kremlin’s PR “Wizard of Oz” whose trajectory Curtis contrasts so perceptively with Limonov’s. From my memory of that meeting, the intel guy told us that in the summer of 1999, Surkov had arranged a crucial, highly secret meeting in a Spanish coastal resort involving Boris Berezovsky, then-FSB chief Vladimir Putin, and a top Chechen rebel leader, possibly Shamil Basaev or one of his surrogates.

We all know what happened shortly after this alleged meeting: Yeltsin appointed Putin as his new prime minister, Basaev’s Chechen separatist rebels launched an invasion into the Russian republic of Dagestan, and then terror spread across Moscow and Russia: apartment buildings started blowing up, killing hundreds of Russians, sparking Putin’s invasion of Russia. Putin’s rating shot up from about 3% to the most popular Russian politician of the past decade.

A little over a year after Putin’s invasion of Chechnya, Limonov was jailed, becoming Vladimir Putin’s first political prisoner; when Limonov eventually beat the rap and was released from prison in mid-2003, he emerged bigger than ever, the most powerful leader of the nascent democratic opposition, so powerful that even US-backed chess champion Garry Kasparov formed an alliance with Limonov, because Limonov was the only opposition figure in Russia with real followers. And more importantly, Limonov was the only opposition figure who had worked out a real oppositional politics: radical, novel, theatrical, and inspirational.

Curtis’s piece on Russia focuses more the early radical-right aesthetics of Limonov’s politics, when his punk influences were more apparent (Curtis himself first emerged in the late 70s punk avant-garde as part of a movement that included the Gang of Four, around the time that Limonov was involved in the first wave of New York’s punk scene). But Limonov’s prison experience affected his politics as much as the new political environment he faced after he was released from prison–a new political reality molded largely by Surkov.

I asked Limonov about what happened to that punk-fascist element in the National-Bolsheviks after he got out of jail… and he told me: “Why would we bother playing with fascism anymore when the Kremlin is already fascist? We are an opposition party. And today the most radical position of all is to fight for democracy and elections–against Putin’s fascism. It’s far-right fascism that is banal and oppressive now.”

To quote Yegor Letov’s great anthem: “Я всегда буду против!” (“I will always be anti-!”)

To Limonov’s credit, he called out exactly what the Medvedev presidency would be like in his last column for The eXile before we were shut down by the Kremlin. While Council on Foreign Relations types kept holding out the absurd hope that they could split the “liberal” Medvedev from the “revanchist” Putin, Limonov laid out clearly what to expect from Medvedev back in the spring of 2008:

“Who is Mister Medvedev?” Mr. Medvedev is not a political figure, he is a practically unknown bureaucrat, one of a huge crowd of bureaucrats surrounding Putin. If the elected president had been named Zyuganov or Yavlinski or Kasparov or even Limonov, nobody in Russia would have asked a question: “Who is that man?” Because these are political leaders, actors in Russian political play. They are known to general population. Mr. Medvedev, on the contrary, is not known, or wasn’t known, at all. Mr. Medvedev is not a leader of political party, he is not a member of political party, so he is not a political man. We can guess that he is a member of Putin’s circle of close friends, a member of some inner circle. If he is to be appointed to the post of guarding of their interests, we are guessing that Mr. Medvedev is trusted by Mr. Putin’s group and Mr. Putin himself.

So the answer to the question of “Who is Mister Medvedev?” is shamelessly simple. He is a guardian of Mr. Putin’s property and of property of members Mr. Putin’s group. In Russian criminal world could be found an exact definition of Mr. Medvedev’s role: he is “smotriaschiy”—the caretaker, somebody who is looking after the property and after interests of the criminal group. I didn’t say that Mr. Medvedev is a criminal himself, he is wearing expensive suites and expensive ties, I said that he is chosen to be the caretaker who looks after interests of Mr. Putin group.

Personally, I expect from Mr. Medvedev nothing. The most probable behavior will be filling advice-orders from Mr. Putin. Because Mr. Putin’s group is constructed in the same manner as all groups of power are constructed in Russia, including criminal groups. Leader, “Chief Papa”, is a head of a group, even if he will have no official post, he will forever be father to the group—a “papa.” Putin is “papa” in his group, just for now it is more convenient to group interests that Mr. Medvedev will hold post of President of Russia. “Papa” Putin will for a time hold the second post in the State, the post of Prime Minister. But, one should understand, Putin will be second on the state hierarchy. Inside the group hierarchy, Putin will always be “papa.” As in all closed societies, “papa” will stay “papa” until his physical death. That is what one should keep in mind when thinking about Mr. Medvedev and Mr. Putin.

Is it possible that Mr. Medvedev will rebel against “papa” Putin? It is highly unlikely. Because such a rebellion will overturn the closed society-group of Putin. Such rebellion will work against interest of all members of a group. Mr. Medvedev was, I presume, chosen exactly for his obedience to “papa” personally, and for his obedience to the laws of the Putin’s group. …I can only applaud that wise decision. He is the best choice for Putin’s group.

But, of course, the main interests of general population is to get rid of Mr. Putin’s as soon as possible. “Papa” is good for his group, but for us he is not “papa.”

When the four Kremlin agents visited The eXile’s offices in June 2008, the first thing they asked me about was Edward Limonov. It’s easy to see why.

Limonov and Kasparov

While we’re on the subject of Limonov, I want to repost one of my favorite of all of his eXile columns here. If you think you can pigeonhole Limonov, first read this great piece—you can’t understand Limonov, the appeal of the National-Bolsheviks and the Russian mindset, without understanding the sheer energy and pride in Russian self-hatred—or what looks to Westerners like self-hatred:

Through Black Glasses (Limonov on Russia)

By Edward Limonov

Russian nation was created by Russian climate and Russian blood.

Contrary to common misconception, Russians living on territory of Russian Federation are not of Slavic blood. The ancient inhabitants of Kiev’s principate were Slavic people, that’s true.

When Moscow principality was created a few centuries later in the 14th century, its population was overwhelmingly Urgo-Finns. Descendants of Kiev’s genealogical tree, their princes were originally of Slavic blood. But when Kiev’s armies moved north with their small troops, they conquered enormous vast variety of Finnish tribes who lived on enormous territory of European Russia. Only aristocrats of Russia were originally Slavs. Simple folk were descendants of Finns. That is why it is practically no different between “Chuvash” and “Finn.” And that is why Serbs are so different from Russians. Because Serbs are Slavs.

Russians are a depressive tribe because of centuries they were living in shadows of moisty forests. Russians are as unhappy with alcohol as Finns are.

So, forget about Slavs. When you will adopt my vision of Russian history, and of Russians, you will understand who Russians are.

I am the best Russian writer, but I am forced to confess that I hate Russian language. Russian words are painfully long, they remind me of naked slimy worms. You know, those pink awful creatures that you can see on some hot summer night on path you walk. Worms get out of soil to copulate under the moonlight. Russian words are copulating on my table every day and night. I am looking at them with hate and I am screaming. I am gnashing my teeth. Why should put “icheskaya” to the end of “social” in “Social Republic?” Seven letters I am adding for what fuck? Fucking “icheskaya!” Hysterical, hystericheskii laugh goes out of me when I am imaging those fucking Urgo-Finns in their shadowy forests. They move in slow motion, they take their time. Why wasn’t I born in a clear lucid language dealing in “Achtung!” and “Shnell?” And when I think that Russians are only a handful of 142 million readers, it’s really depressing for a writer.

The so called “Russian Soul” can be also explained by origins of the Russian people. Proverbial slowness of Finns (“hot Finnish lads!”) can be seen as phenomenon of Russian soul. Enigmatical Russian Soul is simply Russian man, uncertain, slow to decide, hesitating, never sure of itself, never sure of its own decision. Forest man with a milky skin, with thin blond hair. Not a Slav, but a Finn, Finn, Finn! And don’t accuse me of racism. Happily we have Turks and all sorts of Mongols amongst us. But the sick from alcoholism urban Russian Europeans are descendants of native Urgo-Finns and their tribes. They have shadowy mysterious souls because for hundred generations their ancestors were living by the river banks in the forests. They like to get drunk and to weep. Of too many trees, of too much of river’s water the Russian Soul is created.

Then, of course, we live in a terrible climate. We have eight months of winter and only four of summer. This summer, however, can be called a “summer” only such on condition that you have never travelled abroad. The lack of sunshine is chronic on the Russia’s territory. Everything is explained by its climate and the Urgo-Finn blood. Even more, the blood is explained by the climate. It moves slowly because of the freeze. No sunshine makes our kids look sad. When I was young, I thought almost everyday why “we Slavs” (I thought we were Slavic people) living in such an unhuman, uncomfortable climate? Why we didn’t move out of that terrible territory? However, I had tried to move. Our national ideas for centuries was to move south. We fought First World War to capture the the straights of Bosphorus and Dardanelles. We didn’t get it, alas. (Before that, in January of 1878, we were some kilometers from Istanbul-Constantinople before English bastards intervened.) Russian man carries all weight of his climate on itself. My deepest belief is that Russia should swallow Kazakhstan territory if we want our children to have sunshine.

Russian women are very, very bad. The worst of all. Russian women is like the Russian Government. Most Russian women at least are good looking when they are in their twenties. Some Russian women are gorgeously beautiful. But they are bad. They are treacherous because they have no moral principles. Christian faith was eliminated during existence of the Soviet Union so nobody taught Russian women morals. No such discipline was taught in Soviet schools. Russian woman hates man because she is envying him. She wants to be as brutal and stupid as him, she wants to lay on a divan doing nothing as man does, but she has less possibilities. Russian woman is disastrous, relationships with her destined to be tragedy. There is no way that you will end happily. You must subjugate her. If not, she will subjugate you. On both occasions, you will lose. Don’t forget that abortions and divorces were permitted even in Stalin’s Russia, so our country educated women as bitches. Millions of bitches walking our streets. I am absolutely and positively on the side of Muslim strict code of behavior for women. Their system of separation of sexes if effective and healthy.

Russian Government is bloody beast eating human flesh. It is deeply medieval in its principle conceptions. Russian Government strongly believed that Russians are subjects of Russian Government, that they are its property, that Russians should be physically punished for not showing proper respect for its Government. European Governments behave cruelly towards foreign populations, towards Yugoslavs or toward Iraqis. But Russian Government represses its own citizens. Russian Government never said one honest word. Blatant lies, we, citizens, hear from Government. They terrorize us.

Their instrument are police, brutal and unhuman, just millions of scoundrels dressed in grey uniforms. And judges: archaic men and women with terrible medieval faces and black souls under their judges clothes.

As you understand, my view of Russia is macabre, like Lovecraft’s work. I hope country will change soon, I am working for it. Then I will look at my country through rosy tinted glasses. Just wait.

Would you like to know more? Read the Adam Curtis piece “The Years of Stagnation and the Poodles of Power” from his BBC blog. Also read Mark Ames article “The Think-Tank Archipelago: Adam Curtis on how Libertarian Think-Tanks Crippled Thinking”.

For more background, read the Vanity Fair feature on The eXile, Limonov and Russia: “Lost Exile”.

Would you like to know more? Buy The eXile: Sex, Drugs and Libel in the New Russia co-authored by Mark Ames and Matt Taibbi (Grove).

With violence and government crackdowns making headlines from so many familiar parts of the world, there’s hardly been a peep in the media about the biggest and ugliest massacre of all: Last Friday in Kazakhstan, riot police slaughtered up 70 striking oil workers, wounding somewhere between 500 and 800, and arresting scores. Almost as soon as the massacre went down in the western regional city of Zhanaozen, the Kazakh authorities cut off access to twitter and cell phone coverage–effectively cutting the region off from the rest of the world, relegating the massacre into the small news wire print.

But not before someone was able to get a video out to YouTube last Friday, showing the moment when the striking oil workers rushed the barricades. They’ve had to have put up with inhuman, medieval abuse for months now, culminating with the murders a few months back of a striking oil worker and the 18-year-old-daughter of another union organizer, as well as the jailing of a labor lawyer working with the striking oil workers.

Keep in mind, the oil company whose workers are striking for better pay and union recognition, KazMunaiGaz, is “owned” by the billionaire son-in-law of Kazakhstan’s Western-backed president-for-life. Among Kazakhstan’s leading American partners are Chevron, whose website boasts, “Chevron is Kazakhstan’s largest private oil producer”–adding this bit of unintentional black humor:

“In Kazakhstan, as in any country where Chevron does business, we are a strong supporter of programs that help the community.”

Indeed. First, here is a video showing striking oil workers last Friday breaking up the totalitarian-state’s official celebration of its “Independence Day” (Kazakhstan was one of the 15 Soviet republics that declared independence in 1991; the republic’s Communist Party leader, Nursultan Nazarbaev, stayed on as the “democratic” ruler ever since). At about the 3:30 mark you’ll hear and see gunfire as the massacre is in full-swing:

Here is another video, the one that first went around last Friday that is more dramatic, showing the moment when the striking oil workers stormed the barricades and tore down their hated autocrat’s Independence Day stage…ending with gunfire and riot police moving into the square:

That went down on Friday. We know very little even today because the government clamped down on all communication with the outside world, cutting off cell phone communications and Twitter, imposing martial law, and bringing in special forces and riot police to terrorize Zhanaozen and other cities in the oil-rich west where sympathy strikes and protests have broken out. Journalists have been barred, and two reporters from reputable Russian online media outlets have been arrested. The government claims 15 dead; strikers, who have proven far more reliable, say at least 70 are dead and 500 wounded.

Even the brief and highly controlled “tour” arranged by the authorities for a handful of reporters in the aftermath produced this gruesome account:

Rights activists will likely also be concerned by what appeared to heavy-handed treatment of detainees at Zhanaozen’s main police station Sunday evening. Journalists at the station reported hearing screams coming from what appeared to be interrogation rooms, while a number of men with bloodied faces were lined up in a row in the corridors with their faces against the wall.

Reporters visiting the town under close supervision were not freely permitted to speak with detainees or residents.

Oil workers have been striking since the beginning of summer for the right to unionize, and for better pay. In response, the state-run oil company has already fired hundreds of workers for “violating labor laws,” while dividing up communities and the workforce. By September, workers who held out with the strike were on the verge of starvation; marriages were breaking up, and tensions were growing hotter. Amnesty International and Human Rights Watch came out criticizing the Kazakh authorities for their harsh treatment of the strikers and labor organizers. (Read this excellent English-language account here.)

While the brutality translates into living Hell or violent death for locals, keeping those labor costs down has worked wonders for Chevron’s profits, as Forbes recently reported:

Chevron Rises To $104 As Kazakhstan Kicks Up Production

10/13/2011

Chevron, the second largest vertically integrated oil major, has been expanding its operational foothold in the oil rich state of Kazakhstan over the past few years.

The nation’s vast unexplored resources of oil and gas have become a attractive destination for companies such as Chevron, Exxon Mobil and ConocoPhillips seeking new frontiers for oil and gas exploration.

Chevron has taken the early lead in establishing operations in the former Soviet republic with two major upstream projects as well as a manufacturing facility. The future expansion of operations in Kazakhstan is expected to add greatly to Chevron’s overall production output.

We have a $104 price estimate for Chevron which is a 6% premium over its current market price.

The oil majors’ fondness for Kazakhstan’s highly profitable oil may also explain photographs like this, showing Kazakh “SpetzNaz” or special forces troops sent in to crush protests–wearing helmets and brandishing shields that read, in English, “Police”:

Here is a video of the Kazakh SpetzNaz sent in to quash sympathy protests in the nearby city of Aktau:

Reports of torture are filtering in…and of roaming undercover police death squads in white jeeps hunting the streets for working-age males to pick up and intern.

Meanwhile, the protests are still going on throughout the country, the police crackdown is getting more vicious, and almost no one outside of Kazakhstan knows a thing about what’s going on there, because there are too many uprisings going on all around the world, uprisings that are twittered and cell-phone-cammed and YouTubed…and if your massacre and your oppression doesn’t make it to Twitter or isn’t uploaded onto YouTube, then it doesn’t exist, and you are all alone.

UPDATE: Kazakhstan is represented by the lobbying firm founded by former Mississippi governor Haley Barbour, which today goes by the name “BGR Gabara.” Among other things, the lobbying firm was busted working on a plan to smear Sting after he canceled a concert in Kazakhstan recently due to human rights abuses. Christ, he’s crap as it is, why smear the one half-way decent thing Sting ever tried doing? Lovely buncha guys, the Barbour Griffith & Rogers folks are.

UPDATE 2: Since this article was published, a longtime defense industry propaganda flak in DC, Joshua Foust, waged a campaign to discredit my article’s death toll figures and defend the Kazakh regime’s own figures for how many it massacred. Foust also characterized as a “lie” Chevron’s partnership deals with the state oil company involved in the massacre — if so, that would make Chevron liars to their own shareholders and to the public. I thoroughly debunked Joshua Foust here. One of Foust’s blogger pals then tried discrediting the heroic Russian journalist I used as a source, Elena Kostyuchenko of the same Russian muckraking newspaper where Anna Politkovskaya worked. I responded here.

Would you like to know more? Read the follow-up to this article: “Failing Up With Joshua Foust: Meet The Evil Genius Massacre-Denier Who Shills For War Profiteers” and “Joshua Foust & Friends Smear Crusading Lesbian Russian Reporter Elena Kostyuchenko As ‘Dumb Hag’…”

Mark Ames’ “How Dick Cheney Got His Cold War On.”

Buy The eXile: Sex, Drugs and Libel in the New Russia co-authored by Mark Ames and Matt Taibbi (Grove Press).

Click the cover & buy the book!

Well folks, the world’s longest neocon death-watch is over: Christopher Hitchens, “whose main distinction in the English literary world was his alacrity in betraying friends when advantage loomed,” is finally dead. Readers of The eXiled have sent us so many comforting emails today, because you know how this occasion pains us, in a gloating-through-tears sort of way. We ask you to join us in gloating together. For today we have lost Christopher Hitchens, but we have gained an irony: For Hitchens died on the day that his beloved Iraq War Debacle came to an end.

Why, God, why?! 

Or better to ask, “Why, America? Why all the shameful blubbering over this bloodthirsty limey hack? What is wrong with you people?”

We already answered that question too a few years back:

Americans have been falling in unrequited love with these glib visiting Brits since frontier days. Every time a 19th-c. British author overspent on child prostitutes or laudanum, he or she embarked on an American lecture tour to repair the family finances, following Dickens’ path from one muddy American boomtown to the next. At every stop the author would let the yokels adore him for a few minutes, then retire to make careful notes on the locals’ ignorance, foul table manners and general stupidity for the scathing book to be published once safe in London. And the Yanks fell for it every time. After wining and dining their distinguished visitor, the social elite of Podunk would order copies of the noble visitor’s account, hoping to see their names in print-only to be stunned at the lecturer’s sketch of Podunk as a stinking backwater, and brief description of its leading lights as an “execrable mob of beasts.”

I’ll bet an appendage Hitchens hates his groveling audience of American suckers just as much as his Victorian predecessors did. His earlier books are remarkable for their strident anti-American tone–and I mean compared to other books by British Trotskyites. In other words, he’s rabid, folks. He’d hit that nuclear trigger and vaporize your sweet hometown in a second, ya suckers.

Yes folks, we shall miss Chris Hitchens. And so today, in a very non-exploitative manner, we are reprinting The eXiled’s eXclusive Martin Amis “Pre-elegy” to Hitchens that we published 15 months ago, in anticipation of today’s tragic news. As we explained last September,

Instead of waiting for the throat cancer to take him away, we decided to get proactively involved in the ol’ warmonger’s impending death by generating, through our new technology, The Big Eulogy (or “Pre-legy”) we’re all waiting for: the Martin Amis funeral speech, before it’s written.

Our programmer created a virtual Martin Amis verbiage-generator tool called MartinMate 2.0. Using MartinMate 2.0, we plugged in three key variables– “Hitchens,” “Terror,” and “Throat Cancer”–and ran them through the virtual Amis to generate a eulogy that will have them weeping in the seminar aisles, but in a smart and highly literate weeping sort of way.

The Man Whose Pharynx Was Horrorized

By Martin Amis

In Memory of Christopher Hitchens, 1949-[TK date of publication 2011] (note to ed: hold this piece for publication until throat c. gets Hitch; then publish IMMED. MA)

The first hiccup of his usurpation was the second bottle. It slithered past the incisors, a Mamba of zooanthropic vengeance, exuding a peaty pathos, a 12-year-old blurt of inhumation, to crash against the pharynx which had held, Cincinattus-esque, against so many lucre-hefted Caledonian tides, but which on this first day of a coming future teetered and fell, a single twin tower, a meat WTC, revealing in its nude Lucretism the weakness of the West. The belch of flame engulfed us all. It was the end of everything. In all the great conurbations of the trembling Occident, we took a step backward, appalled and sickened by that belch of the grave.

The pharynx: une rose en steak, a cellwall sturdy yet preemptively extinguished like Harold’s at Hastings, stood revealed as mere jello against the Cullodenic onslaught of dissolution, literal, Balrogian, galvanic. Its first insolent anthem was a belch of Gehennan digestic juices screaming Jihad. Their chthonic conturbation overwhelmed Oxbridge, Fleet Street, and obliterated the Canary Wharf of his voice.

Yet the loyal were slow to assign verity to the dispersing cloud of thanatos, the radius of Terror, the red circle of total destruction mapped by that hiccup, for more than a pharynx wobbled in the scales. This was the pharynx that, like Lady Gaga’s meat dress, shielded multitudes from the unspeakable. This voicebox shimmered wetly as impassable barrier to the desert hordes, a blood-gorged sahel holding back the sands of the Sahara, each grain incised with Koranic verses promising death. It was as if, in a documentary produced by Elburzian deities for our demoralization, we were watching in slow motion as an infiltrated grain of sand slipped through security, evaded the metal detectors unturned to silicate, however fanatical, and by stearine mimicry of the Western smile, was assigned a seat on that precious pharynx, economy class no doubt but deadly enough for all its demotic parsimony, and once strapped in, the safety video mournfully complete, the seat-belt sign turned off, this alien silicate, this Horda of fundamentalism, left its seat on the pharynx and migrated throatward, recruiting comrades among the notoriously perverted tribes of the lower throat, the upper Nile, the treacherous Nubia of a now utterly vulnerable Egypt: his very head.

(Note to ed. Is this enough? I can do you however much you want but it will be twice the usual rate—close friend, v. shaken up, etc. MA)

[Yasha--delete these notes from Marty before posting, he gets v. upset. don't want Marty doing another of his 'Marty breaking bathroom mirror Marty taking photo of self in cracked mirror looking scary/angry/smart Marty publishing photo in Guardian with essay on anger and Terror' sort of thing happening again--Ames]

Would you like to know more? Read Ramon Glazov’s “How Christopher Hitchens Robbed Hunter S. Thompson’s Grave” and Mark Ames’ “Christopher ‘Blubber-Jaw’ Hitchens Picks A 3-Against-1 Fight With A Syrian Nerd And Still Gets His Ass Stomped”.

Buy The eXile: Sex, Drugs and Libel in the New Russia co-authored by Mark Ames and Matt Taibbi (Grove Press).

Click the cover & buy the book!

There are a lot of reasons why Russians–young Russians, young Muscovites in particular–poured out into the streets last Saturday to protest rampant election fraud in the Duma vote. For the past couple of decades, young Muscovites couldn’t be bothered with politics of any sort–they’ve been dealing with fraud-riddled elections going back to 1996, or 1993–take your pick of post-Soviet elections. 

It’s all pretty complicated, and it’s been building for awhile from what I’ve been hearing from friends over the past 18 months or so, but anyway here are a few sample videos that should give you a better, closer-up sense what’s going on there, and demonstrate in a more immediate way why so many Generation-Putin Muscovites are turning on to the adrenaline buzz of political action and fighting power face-to-face. Even for the normally jaded, impossible-to-shock Muscovites, being jaded and cynical has gotten boring.

Before getting to those vids, keep in mind a couple of things here: 1) Russians tend to be tougher and more anarchic by nature than Americans and other Westerners–it’s a special kind of anarchism that comes with controlling 1/6 of the world’s land mass but only 1/10th of neighboring China’s population (and falling);  2) to quote Dr. Limonov, “The fundamental difference between the Russian character and the American: Maximalism”; 3) recent historical memory: In the 1990′s, younger Muscovites didn’t take to the streets in big numbers because Communism sucked so badly; Under Putin, younger Muscovites didn’t take to the streets because Yeltsin sucked so badly; under Putin’s second-banana, Medvedev, the sucking stagnated along with the faces and storylines–it became repetitive, and the blame belonged to the current elite. There’s no recent-bad-memory to blame present-tense misery on. 4) Muscovites are fanatical vacationers, and they tend to vacation in places that suck less than Moscow. When you have all these young travel-junkies from Moscow dreaming only of their next vacation, and meantime comparing the corruption, high prices, and the in-your-face elite that doesn’t even have the decency to pretend to put on a pretend-democratic election, it doesn’t take long for that to get converted into resentment and the urge to sucker-punch back.

So here are a few samples:

1. Medvedev vs. Kudrin (dubbed): This was the smackdown that got smacked down, and whatever else you say about this clip, it’s some of the best Raw Power-Politics I’ve seen in awhile. (To compare, in this country, folks can’t even handle it if some uppity hillbilly barks “Liar!” at a president who, let’s be honest here–lies. I was annoyed by the collective squealing when that “Liar!” shout happened, and seeing this Medvedev-Kudrin clip only reminds me what sorry excuses for human-plankton Democrats are on this score.) In this clip, President Dmitry Medvedev is doing his best to pimp-slap his “liberal” Finance Minister, Alexei Kudrin, before the TV cameras…but as it goes on, you realize that it’s President Medvedev who’s getting dick-slapped harder. Watch Kudrin’s snide expression, his barely-contained smirk that nearly breaks out into full mocking giggles.

Background: This failed attempt at a dressing-down took place a few months ago, in late September. Putin has just announced that he’s going to switch seats with Medvedev–Putin will take the presidency back, and hand the prime minister’s job to his favorite second-banana. That leaves Medvedev looking even more like Putin’s monkey than ever before, when people could at least sort of lie to themselves; and it left Alexei Kudrin, the Finance Minister and the favorite of Western bankers, spurned and bitter. Kudrin thought Putin was going to name him as the new prime minister, not Medvedev. (The same thing happened to Kudrin in late 2007–most people thought Putin would anoint Kudrin as his successor, but in the crazy intra-FSB war that went on in 2007, one siloviki faction that didn’t want a President Kudrin arrested his deputy in the finance ministry, Sergei Storchak, jailed him, and squeezed him hard, until Putin surprised all factions by anointing Dmitry Medvedev as the new president instead.) Point being, this is the second time Kudrin got stood up for one of the two top spots in Russia. So the day before this video clip, Kudrin was in Washington DC meeting with all the World Bank and IMF austerity-whores, wherein he started bad-mouthing Medvedev as some kind of deficit-spending Big Government bogeyman. What you’ll see here was Medvedev’s attempt at restoring his credibility:

COMMENT: What was supposed to be a dressing-down turned out to be humiliating open defiance: “Yeah, sure Dima, put that in an email to me, meanwhile I’ll talk this over with the guy who’s holding your leash.”

2. “You are Surkov [Kremlin] propagandists!”: This was supposed to be a major FoxNews-style “ambush” by a pro-Kremlin TV station, NTV, meant to embarrass and discredit a Western-backed polling organization called “Golos.” Until recently, Russians would lap up a TV attack-hit on an American-backed “liberal” election polling outfit like this, if only out of a knee-jerk patriotism and resentment over how the West screwed Russia in the 1990s and in Kosovo. Most Russians had about as much fondness for a “liberal” outfit like “Golos” as FoxNews zombies have for anything “liberal” in this country. But as you’ll see, the “Golos” guy, Grigory Melkonyants is no pussy. Melkonyants pretty much invents the ultimate anti-oligarch-media-ambush killer by repeating 84 times, over and over, “You are Surkov’s propagandists” ["Vii--surkovskaya propaganda!"]. By “Surkov” he means “The Kremlin”–as in, “You are Kremlin propagandists.”

Vladislav Surkov is the Kremlin’s Wizard of Oz, Putin’s psyops chessmaster and PR spin-doctor–Surkov has almost singlehandedly shaped and framed political reality in the Putin-era, going back to 1999. [Read the excellent Wall Street Journal profile on Surkov by Gregory White and Alan Cullison that you can dowload here in this pdf.] You don’t need to understand Russian to understand how deeply satisfying and funny this video is–you just need to have watched some old Bugs Bunny or one of those old John Cleese “how to annoy” clips to grasp the comedy here, as the pro-Kremlin “ambush” TV crew gets angrier and angrier, burning red with steam boiling out of their ears like Yosemite Sam as their “ambush questions like, “Do you work for the CIA?” and “Who pays you your money” are answered with the exact same “You are Surkov’s propagandists” over and over and over. Eighty-four (84) times, folks. That’s how you shove a spiny bug up Power’s ass, Russia-style. Russians are no strangers to Bugs Bunny, or to the art of annoying smug, powerful servants of the state (see under: Gogol, etc).

WATCH (this video was cam-filmed by a Golos colleague–just listen for: “Vii Surkovskaya propaganda”):

3. “Nashi” Putin Youth: Early last week, the Kremlin bused in hordes of non-Muscovites into Moscow to work out some of their latent resentment against the snotty Muscovites; Moscow is a kind of city-state fortress of European-level wealth barricaded within 11-time-zones of Third World decay. So often all it takes to get a non-Muscovite to come to Moscow and show their support for Putin is a free bus ride, a place to sleep, and the promise that Moscow cops won’t harass them, and you can raise your “Nashi” army.

First up, and probably most famously last week, is “Sveta from Ivanovo.” Ivanovo used to be known as the “city of brides” in Soviet times, because the textile industry there employed largely female workers. This video is short, so you don’t need to know Russian to get the gist of what’s happening here. “Sveta” can’t answer a simple question: What has United Russia done for her? In the middle of her stumbling, she weakly suggests, “There are more vegetables”:

And here is another popular clip last week showing  out-of-towners in the center of Moscow hiding their faces as they chant “Medvedev! Victory!” This is the first time supporters of the Kremlin have felt compelled to hide their faces, out of shame perhaps–or more likely, out of fear. Whatever resentments they harbor against rich Moscow, there’s also the hick outsider’s instinctive awe and fear of Moscow, of the capital’s awesome wealth and its inhabitants’ sophistication. So these “Nashisti” kids must have sensed that they were being used, that this wasn’t the usual Putin rally, and that the same Muscovites from the Kremlin who brought them here could easily throw them under that bus if the situation demanded:

Obviously this is just scratching the surface, but it’s a start.

Anyway, in the upcoming days, we’re hoping to publish a more in-depth piece by a former contributor to The eXile. We’re also working on getting something soon from former eXile columnist Edward Limonov, who just submitted his application to run against Vladimir Putin in next year’s presidential elections–and against billionaire New Jersey Nets owner Mikhail Prokhorov, the guy who owns the magazine SNOB. Not exactly a 99-percenter type, Misha Prokhorov. My oh my, I could tell you stories, good stories, funny stories…I better not, better save it for some other time–.

Would you like to know more? Read “Over 10,000 in Moscow Protest Election Fraud…The 99-Percent Everywhere Is Sick of Oligarchy” by Mark Ames, and “How The West Helped Invent Russia’s Election Fraud: OSCE Whistleblower Exposes 1996 Whitewash” by Alexander Zaitchik and Mark Ames.”

Buy The eXile: Sex, Drugs and Libel in the New Russia co-authored by Mark Ames and Matt Taibbi (Grove Press).

Click the cover & buy the book!

With Russians on the streets protesting yet another fraud-riddled election, and Hillary Clinton lecturing the Kremlin on the evils of election fraud, we are reposting this important background story on Russian election fraud, and how the West, led by Hillary’s husband Bill, enabled and whitewashed Russia’s 1996 fraud-riddled, stolen elections, which assured that the hugely unpopular Boris Yeltsin, “the butcher of Chechnya” and the creator of Russia’s oligarchy, would remain in power for another term–thanks to the Chechens overwhelmingly “voting” “for” Yeltsin by an overwhelming 73% vote (of 1 million votes even though there were only an estimated 500,000 voting-aged people living in Chechnya at the time of the 1996 presidential elections). Yeltsin’s Western-backed victory allowed him to pick his own successor, Vladimir Putin, in 2000–and here we are today. Among the top whitewashers of 1996′s stolen elections was none other than Michael McFaul, President Obama’s nominee to become the new US Ambassador to Russia.

This article by Alexander Zaitchik and Mark Ames, about the West’s active complicity in Russian election fraud, in creating the template still used today by Putin, was first published in The eXile on November 30, 2007, on the eve of Russia’s 2007 Duma elections, the last time Russians voted in parliamentary elections until this past Sunday.

Who Killed The OSCE?

Ex-OSCE Mission Chief Reveals “Pressure” To Whitewash ’96 Election

“A Victory for Russian Democracy”

—Title of a New York Times editorial, days after the ODIHR-approved 1996 presidential election

“Exit, Russian Democracy”

—Title of a New York Times editorial, days before the ODIHR-boycotted 2007 Duma elections

MOSCOW–When Russia told the OSCE that their election monitoring mission would be severely limited last month, it seemed as though Putin had fired an authoritarian shot out of the blue, baring his inner Stalinist once and for all. The West reacted as if the OSCE was the crucifix of democracy, and Putin’s rejection of that crucifix was evil rejecting good.

Well, that’s one way of looking at it. Another way is that the recent Russia-OSCE door-slamming episode is the inevitable outcome of years of cynical Western manipulation of an organization that once held enormous promise and impeccable credentials, but is now with good reason considered a propaganda tool for the West.

If that last sentence sounds like the paranoid rant of a Putin-era silovik revanchist, then think again. It’s the view held by none other than the man who headed the OSCE’s 1996 election mission in Russia, Michael Meadowcroft.

“The West let Russia down, and it’s a shame,” said Meadowcroft, a former British MP and veteran of 48 election-monitoring missions to 35 countries.

In a recent telephone interview with The eXile, Meadowcroft explained how he was pressured by OSCE and EU authorities to ignore serious irregularities in Boris Yeltsin’s heavily manipulated 1996 election victory, and how EU officials suppressed a report about the Russian media’s near-total subservience to pro-Yeltsin forces.

“Up to the last minute I was being pressured by [the OSCE higher-ups in] Warsaw to change what I wanted to say,” said Meadowcroft. “In terms of what the OSCE was prepared to say publicly about the election, they were very opposed to any suggestion that the election had been manipulated.”

In fact, he says, the OSCE and the West had made its mind up about how wonderfully free and fair Boris Yeltsin’s election was before voting even started.

“The OSCE parliamentary assembly had a separate mission who were passionately pro-Yeltsin,” he said. “So you had two OSCE missions for the election, one of which arrived predisposed to say things were good.” The other was pressured to agree.

Evidence of fraud, such as entire towns in Chechnya voting overwhelmingly for Yeltsin, caused Meadowcroft to liken the 1996 election to those held in African dictatorships. “In Chechnya they’d been bombed out of existence, and there they were all supposedly voting for Yeltsin. It’s like what happens in Cameroon,” he said.

While the Western media portrays the Russia-OSCE spat as a simple battle between bright democracy and dark autocracy, the Russian elite has a deeply cynical view of the OSCE based on personal experience. As Meadowcroft was not allowed to say at the time, Yeltsin’s victory in 1996 was rife with fraud. Most important to the outcome was the months-long blanket television support Yeltsin received and a “black PR” campaign against his Communist foe, Gennady Zyuganov; Russia’s print media was almost as bad. The election was not a “victory for optimists,” as the Hoover Institute’s notorious Yeltsin-cheerleader Michael McFaul wrote at the time. Rather, the technology of the fraudulent election, blessed by the West, served as the template for future Russian elections. But if few in the West know about this, it’s because the OSCE and the Western media only began to emphasize Russia’s systemic electoral fraud and media manipulation in 2003.

Something to be proud of: “Yanks To The Rescue: The Secret Story of How American Advisers Helped Yeltsin Win”

“[The West] didn’t want [pre-election] criticism that the election had been manipulated, lest the Communists get public mileage out of it,” said Meadowcroft. “And the Communists regarded it as par for the course that they wouldn’t get a fair deal. I went to see the Zyuganov team and they said, ‘Oh it’s a waste of time to give you the dossier [on election fraud], you’re not going to do anything about it anyway.’”

He added that the EU tried to suppress a report about media manipulation submitted by a Belgian colleague working for an EU institution. When he was barred from releasing the report, he handed it over to Meadowcroft, who released it to the media as a private citizen. Few noticed or cared at the time.

Instead, here’s the kind of spin Western publics heard after the 1996 election:

“The preliminary conclusion of the IRI delegation is that this election was Russia’s best ever and reflected the great strides made by the Russian people in institutionalizing their democracy.”

–American observer William Ball III, of the US-funded International Republican Institute NGO, July 1996

“Voting was held… in a democratic, impartial and fair manner.”

–Ernst Meulemann, an observer from the Council of Europe, July 1996

“Now it’s true that President Yeltsin used his incumbency to his own advantage. It’s also true that the Communist candidate, Mr. Zyuganov, used the fact that the Communist Party, the Russian Federation, has a huge grassroots organization, by far the best, the biggest, and most complex organization in Russia, to its advantage. But a number of international observers have judged this to be a free and fair election.”

–Deputy Secretary of State Strobe Talbott, July 1996

“For all the mutual distrust and suspicion that preceded the election, there was consensus on the part of the Government, the Communist opposition and international observers that Sunday’s election had been for the most part free and fair.”

–New York Times, June 18, 1996

“OSCE: ELECTION GENERALLY FREE AND FAIR:

Even before the final results had been tabulated, a delegation of 500 election monitors from the OSCE issued a preliminary statement on 17 June declaring the first round of the Russian presidential election “generally free and fair.”

Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty Europe, June 1996.

Meadowcroft is still shocked by the manipulation of his assessment of the election. “I never said ‘free and fair.’ The weasel words I used were something like ‘a step forward for democracy,’ but I certainly wouldn’t say ‘free and fair’ as far as I was recording it,” he said.

The OSCE continued pumping out glass-half-full reports into the Putin era. In 2000, it was quick to sign off on Putin’s first-round victory, despite widespread evidence of fraud, some of it uncovered by the Moscow Times. “The OSCE should not have approved [the 2000 elections],” the Yabloko party spokesman, Sergei Loktyonov, told the eXile after Putin’s 2003 reelection. “It’s hard to say why they did that.”

But is it? In 2000, Putin was still seen as a “reformer”, as the West’s guy. He had not yet begun to cross Western oil interests or to reassert an independent and muscular foreign policy. Fast forward to 2003 and the OSCE was singing a different tune.

The OSCE hasn’t just destroyed its credibility with its strange criteria for judging some Russian elections fair and others not. As the world considers Moscow’s charge of undue American influence on the organization, it’s worth pulling an OSCE “greatest hit” out of the memory hole. In the run up to the Kosovo war, the organization was used a front for the CIA to deliver communications equipment to the Kosovo Liberation Army, and to gather targeting information for an expected upcoming NATO bombing campaign. As reported by the New York Times in March of 2000:

“When the Organisation for Security and Co-operation in Europe (OSCE), which co-ordinated the [human rights] monitoring, left Kosovo a week before airstrikes began a year ago, many of its satellite telephones and global positioning systems were secretly handed to the KLA, ensuring that guerrilla commanders could stay in touch with NATO and Washington. Several KLA leaders had the mobile phone number of General Wesley Clark, the NATO commander. European diplomats then working for the OSCE claim it was betrayed by an American policy that made airstrikes inevitable. Some have questioned the motives and loyalties of William Walker, the American OSCE head of mission. ‘The American agenda consisted of their diplomatic observers, aka the CIA, operating on completely different terms to the rest of Europe and the OSCE,’ said a European envoy.”

To longtime democracy professionals and election monitors like Meadowcroft, this cynical exploitation of the organization’s good name set the stage for the OSCE’s downfall–a downfall now being blamed on “little brother” non-NATO member countries on the OSCE’s eastern flank.

“The sad thing is that because the OSCE has not been as forthright as it should have been, the people who regard monitoring as a waste of time use this as an argument against it,” said Meadowcroft, reflecting on current Kremlin-OSCE row. “That’s the distressing thing. I feel like even I was compromised by not being tougher. But it’s hard when you’ve got five minutes to go before the press conference and this guy from Warsaw is on the phone saying ‘You can’t say that!’ I said, ‘Look I’m going to speak to the press.’ The response was, ‘No, you can’t say that.’ It was very difficult for me.”

*          *          *

Meadowcroft’s revelations are significant for a lot of reasons. In the first place, we at The eXile are left once again scratching our heads, wondering why no one from the mainstream media bothered contacting the man who headed the observer mission during the most “free and fair” election in post-communist Russian history.

His revelations also help put into perspective what is really going on with Russia’s near-death experiment with democracy. The new low that we’ve reached in late 2007 is not some out-of-the-blue invention of Putin and his siloviki cronies, but rather the result of a joint effort which saw the worst of both sides. Democracy as birthed and fed under Boris Yeltsin was always something like the semi-stillborn fetal-freak in Eraserhead. Most of the Yeltsin-era elite saw formal democracy as a pain in the ass that had to be kept alive to for visiting Western delegations, who looked at the croaking, spitting fetus, covered in rot and slime, and declared, “It looks just like Lady Liberty!”

Meadowcroft relayed some of his own experiences with Yeltsin’s elite “young reformers” and their western enablers—what he called the”economic mafia”:

“What I was being told [by them] in 1996… ‘Why are you bothering us about elections? We’re not going to let this place fall. We’re making too much money. Why bother with elections?”

This paints a familiar if often ignored picture, one that implicates the West in the collapse of OSCE credibility in particular, and the near-comatose state of Russian democracy in general. It’s not fair to simply blame the West for Russia’s problems; but it’s equally disingenuous to deny the West’s role in screwing things up. The current narrative of a happy past and pure elections versus a dark present and lost democracy is easy to swallow but destructive insofar as it increases misunderstanding and paranoia on both sides. Needless to say, it also enables those in the west leading us into a new Cold War based partially on the fantasy of a glorious Russian democratic-past that never was, or at least not since Yeltsin’s shelling of his opposition parliament in 1993.

It’s not that the West won’t be right when it condemns this weekend’s vote. In OSCE jargon, the Duma elections will be “fundamentally flawed.” They will “fall far short” of western standards, if not expectations. It’s not a secret that the Russian state-run media are grotesquely pro-Putin. Or that the election laws have been changed to shut out opposition parties. Or that, as in previous elections, there will likely be some old-fashioned ballot stuffing in the provinces.

Not for the first time, the Moscow Times has helped fill in the blanks with regard to the electoral shenanigans taking place across the country. In a report published November 27, the paper details insider allegations of fraud and the pressure—including outright intimidation and threats—some Russians are experiencing from their employers to vote for United Russia, Putin’s Party, on December 2.

Whatever adjectives are thrown at the elections on December 3, everyone agrees that “Swedish” won’t be among them.

But of all the many statements being made about Putin’s “managed democracy,” the boycott by the OSCE’s Office for Democratic Institutions and Human Rights is considered the most profound. It is certainly the most influential. The ODIHR is still considered the gold standard in the democracy watch-dog game. When it says Boris Yeltsin was elected fair and square in 1996, the New York Times and the most of the rest of the western media were quick to declare a “Victory for Russian Democracy.” When the same body decided not to bless Russia with its presence this year, the country’s democracy was universally declared to have “Exited.”

The truth is it never entered. But that didn’t used to bother the democracy experts at the OSCE.

Meadowcroft has been involved in democracy-building and election-monitoring in Russia and the CIS countries since 1989. In the beginning, he said, international election monitors were seen as “the good guys.” That began to change when the OSCE wrested control of regional election-monitoring duties the United Nations. That, he says, is when the ideological rot set in.

“You could trace the subversion of the OSCE from the moment that the UN had to give way to the OSCE for election monitoring operations in its area,” says Meadowcroft. “There came a point where the UN’s electoral division was not strong enough to insist that it carry out missions in the OSCE region. It was forced to hand over its mission to the OSCE. The UN’s electoral affairs division was originally part of the political department of the UN, which was very strong. And it was shifted out. The UN was in effect politically forced to let the OSCE run stuff in its area. This was largely an American initiative.”

At the end of the Cold War, when the OSCE was still known as the Conference on Security and Cooperation in Europe, there were big hopes. The CSCE had been the forum for the major milestones that lessened superpower tensions and set the stage for the end of the Cold War, from the Helsinki Declaration on Human Rights to early negotiations on the Conventional Forces in Europe Treaty.

“There was this idea that the CSCE would be a ‘UN for Europe’. Havel would be its godfather, the Americans would endorse it, and it would take over the old Federal Parliament building in Prague when Czechoslovakia split,” said Christopher Lord, a former editor of Perspectives: A Central European Journal of Eastern European Affairs and a former consultant for the Czech Ministry of Foreign Affairs.

“What killed it was a proliferation of countries as the Eastern Bloc fragmented,” said Lord. “With the break-up of Yugoslavia the inherent weakness of the CSCE was revealed. Once it was exposed to the stresses of a hot war, the cold war dinosaur fell over sideways and died of shock. The urgency of the situation meant that attention in foreign ministries swung away from the CSCE and back to the UN, and especially NATO. The CSCE, along with the Western European Union, another structure which coulda been a contender, didn’t quite make it.”

The mid-90s brought an expansion of OSCE programs and saw the beginning of a steady shift in its focus. For most of its first 20 years, the CSCE was largely dedicated to hard security issues, with democracy and human rights playing a smaller role. After it was renamed the OSCE, the newly created Office for Democratic Institutions and Human Rights quickly began sucking up scarce resources and energy. Since then, eastern members have begun to tire of the “soft” half of the equation getting so much attention.

East-West tensions within the OSCE have been building for years. Now Russia and most other CIS countries have had enough of the democracy lecturing and want to shift the focus back to hard security matters. The OSCE is, after all, the one pan-European forum where they are, in theory, full and equal members.

Behind the headlines of the OSCE-Moscow spat, a larger showdown will take place at the end of the month in Madrid, at the OSCE’s annual end of the year meeting. There, a new group of OSCE nations, led by Russia, will try to redirect the future of the organization.

Writing in the Eurasia Daily Monitor, Vladimir Socor describes the goal of the new grouping:

“The Russia-led bloc calls for refocusing the OSCE on the military-political dimension… This move continues Moscow’s long-standing attempts to endow the OSCE with functions that could duplicate or interfere with those of NATO and maintain a Russian-influenced grey area in Europe’s East. The novel elements are the bloc basis and extended scope of the proposals. Russia hopes to build up the OSCE into an all-European security body and counterpose it to NATO, particularly in Europe’s East. This is why most Western countries have long resisted turning the OSCE into a full-fledged organization.”

The Russia-led group is also proposing new rules for the monitoring of elections. It wants to weaken what it sees as the western grip on ODIHR, slow the response time for issuing election reports, and spread monitoring missions more evenly across the OSCE’s turf—which famously spans “from Vancouver to Vladivostok.” By all accounts the Russia-led bloc means business and is willing to obstruct the organization’s work until a serious reform plan is on the table.

What all this means is that the OSCE’s judgment on this weekend’s elections is irrelevant. And so is the OSCE as we have come to know it.

Would you like to know more? Read Mark Ames’ “Over 10,000 in Moscow Protest Election Fraud” and “Doom-A: How To Watch Post-Soviet Politics.” Also read Edward Limonov’s “Kremlin Public Enemy No. 1″.

Buy The eXile: Sex, Drugs and Libel in the New Russia co-authored by Mark Ames and Matt Taibbi (Grove Press).

Click the cover & buy the book!

Click on the images to expand comic:

Frame-by-Frame:

This comix was published on November 25, 2003 in The eXile.

Buy The eXile: Sex, Drugs and Libel in the New Russia co-authored by Mark Ames and Matt Taibbi (Grove Press).

Click the cover & buy the book!

Since no one else in the pro-drug camp will say it, allow me: Ron Paul is a drug war asshole. He’s a con artist playing a shell game with our liberties with his slippery proposal that the answer to this savage 40-year war on individual liberty is to transfer the power to destroy lives from one authority (federal) to another equally cruel authority (state). In doing so, Dr. Paul has shifted the moral debate about the drug war from one of barbarism and injustice to his crusty old Confederate gripe about states’ rights versus federal authority.

Here’s the latest whoop-tee-doo:

Lawmakers to introduce bill to legalize marijuana

By Luis Robayo | AFP – Wed, 22 Jun, 2011

A group of US representatives plan to introduce legislation that will legalize marijuana and allow states to legislate its use, pro-marijuana groups said Wednesday.

The legislation would limit the federal government’s role in marijuana enforcement to cross-border or inter-state smuggling, and allow people to legally grow, use or sell marijuana in states where it is legal.

The bill, which is expected to be introduced on Thursday by Republican Representative Ron Paul and Democratic Representative Barney Frank, would be the first ever legislation designed to end the federal ban on marijuana.

This is a moral issue, plain and simple. And there’s nothing moral about providing federal cover for barbarism at the state level. The reason why America forced the South at bayonet-point to dismantle its racist Jim Crow laws is because those Jim Crow laws were immoral, unjust and barbaric, and Washington either had to force the South to dismantle its racist laws, or else be a party to them by providing federal aid and protection to racist states. Until the Civil Rights legislation of the 60s, all of America was an accessory  to that injustice, protecting, aiding and abetting crimes against humanity.

Millions of Americans have been locked up, their lives destroyed, merely for choosing to relieve the pain of existence via something more sublime (opiates, amphetamines) than that shit peasant drug alcohol they feed us. It’s a violation of the Declaration of Independence, the founding document for this country, which enshrines the “pursuit of happiness” as a sacred right of all Americans. This should be simple for libertarians to accept, and simple for them to say, “It’s as evil to oppress non-violent drug-users at the state level as it is at the federal level.” So say it!

Drug decriminalization is an old cause of the Left, who’ve been pushing for legalization long before the Kochs created their “right-wing hippies” and hitched them aboard the marijuana legalization bandwagon in order to Trojan Horse the Kochs’ free-market program. It’s one thing to form an alliance with libertarians when they’re taking what may appear to be a better practical stance on the drug war than their Republican allies (and most Democrats, for that matter). But for fuck’s sake, don’t roll over and scream like Justin Bieber fangirls just because Ron Paul said something that goes about 1/100th of the way towards drug de-criminalization.

Don’t  cede the moral ground on the drug issue to the libertarians, because they’ve sucked the morality out of it by turning it into a States’ Rights issue.

Not unless the libertarians can explain why it’s bad for Washington to lock up a non-violent drug user, but perfectly fine for Alabama or Tennessee or Oklahoma to deprive a pot smoker or meth drinker or smack snorter of their liberty, and shove them into a rape camp prison system, even though they hurt no one at all, least of all themselves.

No one in America, not at the federal, state, county, municipal level, should be legally kidnapped, raped and pressed into slave labor just because they took drugs in the privacy of their own home. Period. And anyone who thinks it makes sense for states to do so, but not Washington, is a raging baboon asshole.

One more thing: This goes out to all of you Weed-Nazis out there. You better not be planning to do what I think you’re going to do once you get your foot another inch or two inside the respectably-legal door: You better not turn around and slam that door on every other drug-user’s face. Because I know that’s what you filthy pot-heads are planning. As all drug users know, Weed-Nazis are the most duplicitous, moralizing blowhards of all drug users. They never shuttup about their idiotic moral categories, ranking marijuana as a “soft drug” as opposed to “bad” “hard” drugs like meth and opiates.

Marijuana is for dumbshits; it makes dumbshits feel creative. In a charitable moment, I’d be okay with giving dumbshits that chance to experience a false sense of purpose on this planet, but the thing is, those of us with more refined drug tastes, with more advanced cognitive powers, know that marijuana is one of GAIA’s most terrifying booby-traps she ever set. THC equals pure terror and paranoia. Which is why I’m all for imposing a federal death penalty on anyone caught using marijuana or referring to it as a “soft drug” in public, or in the privacy of their own homes. That is, unless the Weed-Nazis are on board with an all-or-nothing drug decriminalization program.

Now, one area where Dr. Paul and I can agree on is that heroin should definitely, definitely be de-criminalized. Or so he said at that debate that had all the Confederate hillbillies a-whoopin’ and a-hollerin’.

Yeah, that was pretty cool–I think Dr. Paul, as a “Doctor” who served in Vietnam, knows what the deal is: “Who in this room would run and use heroin if it was decriminalized?” Dr. Paul yammered to the hicks–and if you noticed carefully, you could see Dr. Paul actually putting his hand up as if to say, “Hey, I can name that Doctor in two notes!” and then suddenly Dr. Paul’s eyes got that crazed junkie jones stare to them. He done near stole my heart with that heroin performance. It’s like we all were given a rare glimpse of the younger Dr. Paul, the Dr. Paul circa-1969, when he first learned the virtue of rational self-interest out on the Vietnam battlefield. Triage situation: Dr. Paul is tending to the Immediates…one guy’s guts are wrapped around a nearby tree trunk, his legs a quivering pair of charred stumps…Dr. Paul’s body aches at the sight of this goner; Dr. Paul uncorks a morphine syringe, flicks it, and thinks, “Why waste good clean shit on worm food like this poor bastard? That’d make no rational sense.” So Dr. Paul crouches in the tall grass and pops the morphine into his own shoulder. The warm rush leads Dr. Paul to another rational thought: so he uncorks another morphine syringe, and sticks himself a second time…Next thing you know, those screams and cries for “Medic!” fade into the great big void…

“Doctor Paul, we thought we lost you! What’s the status of your–um, Dr. Paul?”

“Zzzzzz…”

“Oh jeez. Dr. Paul, you’re drooling on that soldier’s small intestines. Didn’t we already discuss this problem last week?”

“Zzzzzz…”

Next thing you know, the Hell of Nam fades from Dr. Paul’s consciousness, the government’s attempts to interfere in his buzz replaced by dreams bathed in gold: Golden light, Golden unicorns, Golden brown…Hey, how about a gold standard!

Whoa, where was I? Oh yeah: Until the libertarians and the Weed-Nazis concede that the drug war is a human rights issue about ending the immoral and barbaric practice of forcing drug users into rape-camps everywhere on American soil, rather than another one of their sleazy States Rights campaigns–until I hear that, and until I hear the Weed-Nazis fight for de-criminalization of all drugs, not just filthy marijuana–until then, I want no part in this.

Devolving tyranny to the states–and adding one shitty drug to the “legalized” list while oppressing the rest–  is just drug-fascism by another name.

Would you like to know more? Read “The Gold-Standard Hustle: Does Anyone Here Speak Paul-tard?”

Buy The eXile: Sex, Drugs and Libel in the New Russia co-authored by Mark Ames and Matt Taibbi (Grove Press).

Click the cover & buy the book!

An American correspondent stationed in Moscow just forwarded me a WikiLeaked diplomatic cable about me, The eXile, and the Kremlin media-stomping in mid-2008 that killed my newspaper and sent me fleeing home. The June 16, 2008 US Embassy cable–marked “CONFIDENTIAL”–correctly put the crackdown on The eXile in the context of a wider (and scarier) crackdown on other Russian media outlets that coincided with the handover of power from Vladimir Putin to the newly-”elected” President Dmitry Medvedev. The cable was given the highly-ironic header “MEDVEDEV ON FREEDOM OF THE PRESS AND THE RULE OF LAW.”

In the three years since I left Russia, I’ve made it a point not to wallow in any nostalgia; getting this in my Inbox forced open some of that experience. Maybe I’ve been a little too militant about my anti-nostalgia policy–but the problem is, I still have a hard time reconciling the two universes, Russia and America. It doesn’t seem possible to have lived two different lives in two different paradigms. To go from that incidents-packed epic… to the craven, Beigeist little script that they offer you here. Those years in Russia barely seem real to me now. I can’t reconcile the two universes–the Russia of Yeltsin and Putin, epic and violent and unpredictable; and 21st century America, a loud-mouthed drama-queen whose idea of “rebellion” and “danger” is joining a billionaire-worshipping cult called “libertarianism” and mouthing whatever latest slogans the cult’s marketing department floats to refresh their “radical” brand. When it comes to petty vindictive komissars policing each other for bad words, Russia doesn’t even compare to America. Just being alive and here in early 21st Century America is a degrading experience. Klendathu may have been an ugly planet, a bug planet… but it’s an amusement park compared to this: “It’s a bland planet…a hall monitor planet!”

It’s not possible to reconcile the two narratives. That’s why I can only seem to remember those Moscow years in the third person, if at all.

Getting this email brought me back to that last moment, reminding me why I had to get the Hell out fast. I’d ruined Medvedev’s big Rebranding Party as the “liberal” champion of the free press and Western values. That same week, the Russian opposition media pissed on Medvedev’s party by headlining The eXile’s demise, and I did everything I could to inflame it. And that reminds me–I blogged about those last two weeks for the late great Radar magazine, from the day the Kremlin agents came to my newspaper’s office, to the day I fled like Snagglepus. Radar, the only brave print outlet, fell a few months after I returned to America, and was bought out by a celebrity gossip site. Naturally. (I’ve gone back and grabbed the old cached blog posts, and put them up on our site for your reading pleasure–click here to read the Last Days of The eXile.)

After I finally read this WikiLeaks cable,  the world I left behind started to come back. And remembering what we did and what we faced then, and remembering the corrupt little rats I’ve faced since coming back here–it really started to piss me off. All I can think to myself is, I have been banished to the Land Of Chickenshits. Chickenshits and Drama Queens–take your pick.

You see, that’s why it’s so hard to think about Russia–what happened there makes absolutely no sense anymore, not in the First Person. Because over there, to paraphrase Rutger Hauer, I saw things you people couldn’t possibly imagine–.

Here, the stakes are so much higher, all the power and wealth and imperial might–should be higher, anyway–and yet there’s no tragedy and no farce for the ages, just a bunch of mean dumb hicks who got control of someone else’s Death Star, and they’re still rolling it three decades later in the longest, dreariest crash scene in history.

In the Land of Chickenshits, fighting real power–you know, like America’s oligarchy– or exposing their sleazy PR schemes, that’s not the sort of thing that appeals to the Chickenshit-at-heart. What makes it all the more demoralizing here is that there’s no sympathetic character, as fiction editors would say. The oligarchs just snap their jaws and roll their eyes back like crocodiles; and their prey, the 99% of Americans who aren’t millionaires, do everything in their bigoted little powers to make you despise them. They despise each other, after all. They don’t want to win; all they want is a chance to lick their beloved billionaires’ heels, just once.

Nope, here in hall monitor paradise, what passes for “brave” and “fighting the system” is titty-twisting the word-police. Or word-policing the titty-twisters. The idiots can’t stop playing this game, no matter what happens around them–two lost wars (going on three), the collapse of the economy–never mind, too busy titty-twisting and braying about how “I’m not politically correct” or tattling on the titty-twisters. Two sides of a tin coin.

It sounds like black comedy from afar, considering this is how one of history’s greatest empires died– but it gets old, and then the getting-old gets old, and then there’s nothing left but the repetition of early-21st century American decadence.

Folks, in 20 years’ time, maybe sooner, when a more intelligent generation than ours–or a more intelligent conquerer like the Chinese–look back at this period of American decline, and sort through all the righteous whingeing and cultural stagnation, they’re gonna say, “Dang, you early-21st century Americans were STUPID.”

Thanks to some Kremlin bureaucrats, I can say with a straight face: “I’m with STUPID.” Every second of my life. The simpering little populist in me wants to make a self-deprecating joke here, something insincere about how I’m just as stupid as the rest of you. But I’m not. I’m just stuck here with you.

Date: 6/16/2008 8:06:00 AM
Classification: CONFIDENTIAL
Source: Embassy Moscow
Subject: MEDVEDEV ON FREEDOM OF THE PRESS AND THE RULE OF LAW

Body: C O N F I D E N T I A L MOSCOW 001699

SIPDIS

E.O. 12958: DECL: 06/16/2018
TAGS: ECPS, PHUM, PGOV, RS
SUBJECT: MEDVEDEV ON FREEDOM OF THE PRESS AND THE RULE OF
LAW

Classified By: Political M/C Alice G. Wells for reason 1.4(d).

1. (C) Summary: President Medvedev has publicly spoken out
twice in recent weeks about supporting press freedom in
Russia and the rule of law. While maintaining that the
government would be responsible for upholding the rule of law
with respect to the mass media, he also stressed that
publishers and editors must be respect moral and cultural
norms. Beyond the rhetoric, Russian national television
remains under strong government influence, a situation that
experts predict will continue. Meanwhile in Moscow, official
actions against smaller media outlets show that the rule of
law will continue to be used against them that offend Russian
political or cultural sensibilities. End Summary.

Medvedev on Freedom of the Press and the Rule of Law
——————————————— ——-

2. (U) In two major addresses this month, Medvedev combined
the themes of press freedom, rule of law, and social
responsibility. In a June 5 address to German political
leaders in Berlin, Medvedev said that “media freedom needs to
be protected, and this protection needs to be enshrined in
the law. ” He tempered these remarks by noting that there was
also a responsibility for publishers to “preserve moral and
cultural values ” in the mass media, including on the
internet. In a June 11 address to the World Russian Press
Congress in Moscow, he told the assembled journalists that
“our immutable guidelines, now and in the future, are the
construction of a just and responsible society, respect for
human rights, freedom of the press and freedom of speech and,
of course, ensuring the supremacy of the law. ”

Two Media Outlets Under Official Pressure
—————————————–

3. (SBU) In Moscow, the application of the rule of law edged
two small media outlets towards closure. On June 5, four
officials from the Federal Service for Mass Media conducted
an unscheduled audit of The eXile, a raunchy English-language
satirical newspaper. AMCIT Mark Ames, the editor-in-chief,
wrote in a blog that the officials asked questions about the
paper ‘s content (including about columns by Edward Limonov,
leader of the banned National Bolshevik Party) and found
several administrative violations for which they fined him
the equivalent of USD 25. According to Ames, news of the
audit had sent his investors and advertisers “running for the
hills, ” and that the paper ‘s debts would now force the paper
to close. The inspectors have not yet made any decisions
based upon the content of the paper, but could issue an
administrative warning and issue a fine if they determined
that the paper had violated the law against promoting
extremism, drug use, or pornography.

4. (SBU) In a separate case, a Moscow district court on June
6 banned the “Ingushetia.ru ” website after ruling that it
qualified as a mass media outlet and that it had disseminated
extremist material. The website, which is registered in the
United States, continues to function, and it is not clear if
the court decision will have any practical effect. According
to press reports, the apartment of Kaloi Akhilgov, one of the
lawyers representing Ingushetia.ru, was searched for two
hours by police on May 29, an action he claimed was motivated
by his defense of the controversial site.

Television Remains Under Political Pressure
——————————————-

5. (C) Against the backdrop of Medvedev ‘s rhetorial support
for press freedom, conservative television host and
commentator Aleksey Pushkov, distinguished by his sharp
critique of the U.S., expressed disappointment to us over the
“too tight control ” that continued to be exercised over the
national television channels by the political leadership.
Medvedev ‘s ascendance had not produced an easing in the media
atmosphere, he noted, with certain topics clearly off-limits,
including any discussion of the relative political balance in
the Medvedev-Putin power “tandem ” or speculation over either
leader ‘s personal life. None of these restrictions were
promulgated in writing, Pushkov commented, and there were
changing standards that made avoiding “red-lines ” more
difficult and increased the tendency toward self-censorship.
Pointing to earlier pieces that he had aired on the
then-newly elected President Putin and his success in
consolidating power, which by 2003 had become too provocative
to touch, Pushkov said any analogous effort to dissect the
early days of the Medvedev presidency was unthinkable.

6. (C) While adamant that the Kremlin (and now White House)
were too conservative in its approach, Pushkov juxtaposed his
interest in seeing more critical coverage to the apolitical

tastes of Russian television viewers. Noting that the most
provocative political show of privately owned Ren-TV captured
less than one percent of television viewers, Pushkov
concluded that Russians increasingly sought what their
Western counterparts demanded: good entertainment. With
respect to his own program, Pushkov maintained that issues of
social justice elicited by the far the greatest
audience-share, followed by gossipy celebrity features, and
attacks on NATO expansion.

7. (C) Prominent First Channel host, conservative magazine
editor, and Public Chamber member Maksim Shevchenko
separately echoed Pushkov,s assessment that Medvedev,s
first month in office had not produced any easing of
television restrictions. Shevchenko conceded that he was
unable to air his strongly held views over the injustice
meted out to Russian Muslims, particularly in the North
Caucasus and especially in the trial over the Nalchik
uprising. While Shevchenko said he was convinced that all
but a handful of the 85 accused in terrorist activities in
Nalchik were innocent, with confessions coerced under
torture, it was unrealistic to expect his government-owned
television channel to allow him to air this topic. It was
“too difficult to navigate, ” Shevchenko said, particularly in
a period of uncertainty over the true power balance. A
provocative political program, he noted, immediately would be
seen through the prism of which clan benefited the most.
While discounting Medvedev,s democratic credentials,
Shevchenko said he expected Medvedev to do more to address
what were “second-tier ” issues for Putin, such as the
strengthening and “modernization ” of Russian political
institutions. Whatever Medvedev,s future aspirations,
Shevchenko dismissed a near-term change in television policy.

Comment
——-

8. (C) While Medvedev ‘s public pronouncements are
encouraging, there has been no short term effect on media
freedom. While the official actions concerning Ingushetia.ru
and The eXile originated at the local level, they do
demonstrate the practical effect of official pressure on the
media.
RUSSELL
“

Would you like to know more? Read “Final Days of The eXile: Mark Ames Blogs the Kremlin Crackdown”

Would you like to know more? Buy The eXile: Sex, Drugs and Libel in the New Russia co-authored by Mark Ames and Matt Taibbi (Grove).

Click the cover & buy the book!

Before heading back to Moscow in June 2008 to face the Kremlin “audit” of The eXile, which I knew meant the death of the newspaper at the very least, I worked out a deal with my editors at Radar magazine to blog about it for an American audience. I hoped at the very least that it might give me a bit of protection.

Radar was the only great print outlet in America, which is why it was doomed to collapse–it’s since been taken over by a celebrity gossip site. I went through the cached archives and found the old blog posts–here they are, in chronological order:

A TROUBLESOME VISITOR

With the recent inauguration of new president Dmitry Medvedev, how have things changed in Russia? Is the authoritarian freeze of the Vladimir Putin years starting to melt into a glorious new spring of freedom? Mark Ames, founder of Russian newspaper the Exile (and Radar contributor) will provide occasional dispatches in pursuit of an answer to that question … if the authorities don’t lock him up first.

June 9, 2008

Thursday morning, Moscow time, four Russian government officials came to the office of my English-language newspaper, the Exile, and conducted an “unplanned audit” of our editorial content. They are carrying out an inspection of my paper’s articles to see, in their words, if we have committed “violations.” And they specifically asked to question me, since I’m officially listed as the founding editor-in-chief.

I started up the Exile 11 years ago with a Russian publisher, and it grew into a kind of cult phenomenon, with an online readership of 200,000 visitors per month, launching the careers of Rolling Stone‘s Matt Taibbi and the “War Nerd,” Gary Brecher, but ensuring that anyone who sticks with the paper is condemned to a life of poverty and paranoia.

In all my years I’d never heard of an “unplanned audit” of editorial content. The insiders whom I contacted all said, “It’s … strange.” That’s how my Russian lawyer reacted, it’s how an American official reacted, and it’s even how the head of the Glasnost Defense Fund reacted, even though his NGO focuses on problems between the Russian media and the Kremlin.

“As far as I know, there has never been a single Moscow-based media outlet which has been audited like this,” Glasnost’s lawyer told me. “We’ve seen a few of these in the far regions, but never Moscow. But really, don’t worry about it, Mark, I don’t think you’re in any personal danger at this point.”

Whenever a Russian tells me, “Don’t worry, Mark,” or, “It’s no problem,” I start to sweat.

I first learned of the government audit last week while I was out in California dealing with a family illness. I was already in a heightened state of paranoia at the time—one week in my native suburbia is all it takes to trigger panic attacks—so when the government sent notice of the “unplanned audit” to our office, my first thought was, “Can an American get political asylum in his own country?” Then I remembered some of the articles I’d written from Moscow—for example, my post–2004 U.S. presidential election editorial titled “Gas Middle America,” and how former U.S. congressman Henry Bonilla (R-TX) once used his office to pressure the Russian authorities into arresting mebecause of a prank I’d played—and the next thing I knew, I was rifling through my mother’s medicine cabinet looking for something strong to steal.

Eventually I calmed down and flew back to Moscow in time for the audit. At 11 a.m., four officials from the Federal Service for Mass Media, Telecommunications, and the Protection of Cultural Heritage arrived—the men in shabby Bolsheviki suits, and a squat middle-age woman with pudgy arms and hands that pinched the seams of her wrists. On the advice of a Russian attorney, we greeted them with a box of dark chocolates. It was solid advice, and probably did more to protect us than a hundred attorneys’ briefs could have.

The Exile‘s office is in a radon-poisoned basement in an old part of downtown Moscow called “Clean Pond,” which refers to a toxic puddle in the center divider of a nearby road. The office is so small that we have to take shifts showing up for work. So it wasn’t easy fitting the four bureaucrats and the few Exile staffers who turned up.

The varied emotional responses to the meeting were interesting. The Westerners, who until last week supported our paper and kept it alive, immediately cut all ties with us, so they weren’t there. The younger Russians on our staff were relatively calm about it. But when our Soviet-era accountant opened the office door and saw the four squat figures in bad official Soviet outfits, she turned white and vanished, the door closing on its own. When our middle-age courier arrived, she too turned white, stopped, then put her head down and walked past us, crossing herself three hurried times in the Orthodox Christian fashion before locking herself in the design room. You have to understand, to anyone with a memory of the Soviet era, those bad suits that the officials wore are extremely menacing, like red stripes on a reptile.

Their very first question was about the writer and opposition leader Eduard Limonov, one of my newspaper’s star columnists since the beginning. It’s not surprising—the Glasnost Fund people thought that Limonov would be their main focus. When I told Limonov about the audit, he seemed proud of me, kind of like how the Goodfellas gangsters greeted the teenage Henry Hill after his first trial: “Well, it’s finally happened!” Limonov said. “You should prepare to be taken to a stadium somewhere, like they did in Pinochet’s time!” he said cheerfully.

The officials asked us why Limonov was in our paper. Did we know much about him? Why did we publish him? Why was he on our masthead as a contributor? They asked to see an example of a recent Limonov column—the first one I pulled out was titled “Mr. Limonov on Mr. Medvedev“—I quickly shoved it under a pile and grabbed the next column I could find. They took that issue, and two others, with them, and told us that they’d have experts translate and check to see if we’d violated laws on printing “extremism,” “inciting national hatred,” “pornography,” and “pro-drugs propaganda.”

Here are a few of the Limonov lines from the article I gave to the officials, written in his trademark broken English: “Russian Government is bloody beast eating human flesh. It is deeply medieval in its principle conceptions … Russian women are very, very bad. The worst of all. Russian women is like the Russian Government. Millions of bitches walking our streets. I am absolutely and positively on the side of Muslim strict code of behavior for women. Their system of separation of sexes if effective and healthy.” Imagine now that you’re a Russian government official tasked with reading this column. Because I sure imagined it. And then I imagined them sending me a new notice, which is why a voice in my head started whispering, “There’s no place like home …”

Next, they asked us to explain our newspaper’s editorial style and concept. It was a good thing that our gorgeous young sales director, Zalina, was speaking for me, because how do you explain to a Russian bureaucrat that a newspaper whose motto is “vanity and spleen” is a low-tech suicide bomb designed to destroy our journalism careers and take down a few assholes with us?

After a difficult and failed attempt at explaining ourselves—a subject they came back to a couple more times—they said that some unspecified Russians had filed complaints about the Exile because it supposedly offended Russians, and mocked and degraded Russian traditions and Russian culture. What did we have to say about it?

Zalina, bless her heart, defended me: “No, Mark loves Russia and Russian culture! Really!”

All four of them turned and looked at me; I could feel a cheesy grin straining over my deer-in-the-headlights expression. Ahem … is this mike on? Hello? So, anyone here from Tomsk-7? No? Tough crowd.

In my opinion, this is the real reason they’re moving to shut us down. What offends the Russian elite more than anything about the Exile is its aggressive refusal to play by the “serious” rules. The authorities can deal with serious print-media criticism of the Kremlin—so long as that media outlet makes everyone look serious and respectable, with serious dull language quoting serious dull think-tank analysts. These days, Russia is all about getting serious and respectable. And it’s also in the grips of a national persecution mania, in which grievances and complexes about the West have exploded into a kind of mass grievance obsession, a frenzied Easter egg hunt for evidence of Western disrespect or unfairness in order to feed this grievance jones. The fact that our paper has also exerted a lot of bile in savaging the West’s Russophobe industry is irrelevant to them, even annoying; all they care about is sifting for evidence of humiliating Russia.

At one point in the three-hour audit, they started leafing through our February Barack Obamaissue, in which we posted a comparison chart of Russians and African Americans in order to tweak Russian racism (examples: “Blacks: Freed by Abraham Lincoln in 1863/Russians: Freed by Tsar Alexander II in 1861″; “Blacks: plastic covering on furniture/Russians: plastic covering on remote control”).

The lady-bureaucrat, who headed the audit team, leafed through the issue … and stopped when she saw a bad drawing of a semi-limp penis.

“What’s this?” she asked, putting her glasses on.

“It’s a column called ‘The Recession Penis,’” I explained. “You see, the Recession Penis reacts to America’s economic crisis, so every time American banks default and housing prices collapse, the Recession Penis gets more excited. It’s, uh, humorous, you see.”

She folded up the issue and handed it to her subordinate to bring back for the inspection.

From there, much of the meeting focused on all of the newspaper’s petty administrative fuckups: missing addresses, missing license number, something should be in Russian here, a registration number there. In all, the violations led to a $25 fine, which was levied on me personally as editor-in-chief.

The official with the mullet took over one of our computers and typed up a “protocol,” which essentially summed up our three-hour meeting. I signed it, only afterward wondering if in fact I’d signed some sort of confession admitting my role in a Trotskyite plot.

After all of the nervousness and fear in the buildup to the meeting, when the three hours were up and they got up to leave, we felt fairly confident. Too confident, in fact. Because today, I’m starting to think differently. I’m thinking this:

A: I live in a gangster police state that’s hell-bent on being respected.
B: These people are now auditing my articles to see if they’re extremist, pornographic, or if they humiliate Russia.
C: Before they left, they took our most recent issue, in which I wrote that the Exile “farts in Russia’s face” and that Medvedev is so liberal our paper can “urinate into the president’s mouth without any fear of consequences,” and he’s so small he should be “zipped up in a squirrel costume and put in a Habitrail.”
THEREFORE, D: The California suburbs are sounding pretty nice to me.

The Russians I consulted with before and after the audit all came to the same conclusion: The authorities are planning to either tame us or shut us down. There’s no more room for the Exile in the new serious/respectable Russia, the Russia of fanatical consumerism and materialism and vile conformism. This is a country where two separate magazines launched proudly billing themselves as the “New Yorker without political reporting.”

In the current climate, the authorities don’t need to jail or destroy you; all they need to do is notify you that you’ve earned their attention, and if you’re on their radar screen, then you immediately comply with whatever you think they want you to comply with, and you get abandoned by everyone around you who doesn’t want to get sucked into your vortex.

And if you do fight the law, then … well, just this past week there have been two examples of what can happen. The opposition webzine ingushetia.ru was closed by court order, and its lawyer had his apartment raided last week (I was planning to use him to help the Exile until that happened); and one of Russia’s largest radio companies was raided by armed police, leaving it temporarily off the air.

Now it’s like I have the Ebola virus. Longtime friends won’t call, contributors want their names expunged from the online record. Even the American media is eerily silent about this story, despite the fact that one of their own is being attacked—could it be because we’ve spent 11 years savaging the Western media here? Or because we once threw a pie filled with horse sperm into the New York Times bureau chief’s face? Just as a single controversial article in Russkii Korrespondent led its rather brash billionaire backer to immediately shut it down last month, so this single audit means that the Exile is now, after 11 years, dead.

The biggest fear of every foreigner in Russia is becoming the focus of Kremlin attention. Any attention. Russians fear it as well, but they’ve internalized it since birth and deal with it differently. Foreigners here operate with a kind of looter’s mentality: On the surface is overconfidence derived from the general sense that there is no authority over us because we think that the Russian authorities would never mess with a Westerner, but underneath that arrogance is a constantly bubbling terror of being stopped at the border, turned back, and subjected to Russia’s arbitrary and brutal state. It’s such an alien country to Westerners that it’s easy think you operate in some kind of H.P. Lovecraft–like parallel plane with the Russians: In one reality, the Westerners as the humans; in the other parallel reality, the Russians as those flying fanged eels. Now that my paper is being examined, it’s as if everyone around me suddenly grew a giant pituitary gland, and all they see are Lovecraft’s fanged eels orbiting around my head, snapping at anyone who comes near me.

Meanwhile, I’m still here in Moscow, waiting for the Kremlin’s experts to audit my dead newspaper’s articles.

*          *          *

THE END OF THE EXILE

June 10, 2008

The Exile is shutting down. Last night I met with my Russian publisher to “put one in its brain,” as George Romero‘s humans would say. Except that putting this paper down is not so easy—imagine if Romero’s zombies had things like tax bills that can’t be ignored, debts to pay off, favors owed to other important zombies—because you never know when you’ll run into that zombie again.

The partners who’d financed us fled for the hills, leaving my publisher and me holding the debt-bomb in our hands. This is not an easy situation. As a rule, my publisher is unusually easy-going for a Muscovite, but he’s also quite large and intimidating—I mean Baltimore Ravens defensive end large. He also runs a massive nightclub, and, well, let’s just say that my publisher knows a lot of people, including a pal of his who runs the Rasputin Gentlemen’s Club, a multi-floor fleshpot that is everything a male wishes the Winchester Mystery House would have been: rooms that lead to everywhere, to desires and fantasies that you never even knew you had, and that you’ll never admit to the following morning. Rasputin is more than a strip-club and more than a Moscow institution: It’s the apex of a flesh-network, involving scores of smaller, lesser strip clubs that feed into Rasputin like minor league teams feeding into the major league club. For nearly five years, from 2002 to 2007, my newspaper’s office was located in the back of Rasputin’s sex club; when we’d order business lunches during work hours, strippers in see-through negligees and glass high-heels brought Borsch and Kotleti to our offices for a mere 40 rubles ($1.50), leading one American former editor to spasm in dangerous palpitation sweats.

Point being: These are good friends to have, but bad enemies to make.

So when my publisher told me last night, “As far as I see it, the Exile‘s debts are yours as well, Mark,” my little saga took a very unforeseen and unpleasant turn.

And then today the media circus finally erupted here in Moscow. What set it off was an article about the Exile‘s closing in today’s Der Spiegel, which was translated into Russian for the online media. Throughout the course of the day today, I’ve been deluged with phone calls and e-mails from the Russian media, who have already begun posting articles misquoting me in that special way that only the Russian media can manage.

Edward Limonov, the politician-columnist whose articles are at least partly responsible for attracting the authorities’ attention, told me that he too was posting an article on www.grani.ru about the government attack on the Exile, and he told me that his opposition partner Garry Kasparov had called him today to ask him about us.

I’d tell you more, vaguely related stuff, like about how the northern city of Syktykvar just had all of the sand stolen from its makeshift “beach” on its river, and the prosecutor is looking for the sand-rustlers, who are believed to be operating a barge on the river … but I have to run to a meeting with my remaining employees, to give them the final death notice, and they keep ringing me as I write this.

Later tonight, FHM magazine is holding a party on the top floor of a new Moscow skyscraper. Since everyone is treating me as if I’m dripping in polonium, I plan to attend, to shake hands with everyone I can, take photos with them, thank them for their crucial support. You see, ever since I was a kid I vowed that if I wound up paralyzed and in a wheelchair, that I’d have my nurse wheel me up to restaurant windows and leave me there to drool, to make the ambulatory types squirm.

My current situation isn’t exactly stick-on-the-forehead dire, but it’s close enough. I’m going to see how people try to squirm from me tonight. Try to squirm, and not get away with it.

*          *          *

HAPPY RUSSIA DAY!

June 12, 2008

Today is “Russia Day.” It’s the official holiday when Russians celebrate their independence—from their own empire. On June 12, 1990, the Russian Republic’s parliament passed a resolution declaring “sovereignty” from the USSR, paving the way for Russia to “free” itself from the 14 other republics it had spent centuries conquering. It would be like Mexico celebrating February 2, 1848—the day Santa Anna was forced to sign away California and the entire Southwest to the gringos—as “Mexico Day.”

Which may explain why Russia’s state-run RIA Novosti grimly announced, “Unfortunately, the name of this holiday disorients the people completely.”

Whatever. Today’s a holiday, so I should relax and enjoy the party and forget about the fact that I’m under attack. For the celebration here in Moscow, the Kremlin is flying in none other than former French president Jacques Chirac, so that Medvedev can pin a medal on the old whore’s saggy man-boobs, to honor his “contribution to promoting Russian culture“—exactly what my paper is accused of not doing properly enough. I guess you don’t get Kremlin medals when you headline your paper that you “dare to fart in Russia’s face.” But that doesn’t explain why Chirac would agree to make such a complete ass out of himself on the world stage. It would be like flying to Riyadh so the king could honor you with a “Female Driving Instructor of the Year” sash.

Perhaps Chirac came just for the after-party. Now that Medvedev is the new tsar, he has the authority to hire his favorite band to play at his Red Square Russia Day party—and wouldn’t you know, he chose none other than Uriah Heep to rock the Kremlin walls down. If you’ve never heard of Uriah Heep—and 99 percent of you haven’t—you’re missing out: They’re a real-life Spinal Tap classic-rock outfit that packs stadiums from Smolensk to Kamchatka, even though they couldn’t land a gig on open-mike night in a Tuscaloosa saloon. True to their Spinal Tap calling, Uriah Heep pulled out of their Red Square gig today at the last minute, fucking up Medvedev’s classic rawk party, which their website blames on the “tour promoters [sic] complete lack of adherence to contractual stipulations.” I can imagine how the Heep fell out with their promoters: “You call this a sandwich, huh, Vladimir? I don’t want this! Because, look, you have to fold it like this, and then … no, it’s a fucking joke, really. I can’t do this, I won’t go to fucking Belarus if I can’t get a proper fucking sandwich.”

Heep or no Heep, there will be no rain on Medvedev’s parade, as the air force scrambled 10 rickety Soviet-era planes to disperse the clouds. And they’ve called up 6,500 police, including 550 OMON paramilitary goons, to make sure to make sure no one bum-rushes the stage when the vertically challenged leader makes his appearance. For a sample of the OMON at work and play, watch this video cut by the Exile‘s coeditor Yasha Levine:

For me, it’s a good thing there’s a holiday break today, because yesterday, my now-dead newspaper, the Exile, became the cause-célèbre story in the Russian opposition media. The attack on my paper got converted into a bag full of burning shit and tossed on the Kremlin doorstep to embarrass Russia’s president Dmitry Medvedev on the very same day that he gave the keynote address at the World Russian Media Conference in Moscow, where he pledged to “ensure media freedom and respect for human rights.” Exiled oligarch Vladimir Gusinsky‘s popular online portal, newsru.com, juxtaposed Medvedev’s speech with the closing of the Exile: “Medvedev made his announcement about supporting the press in the background of the incredible story about the Moscow-based American newspaper the Exile, which is being threatened by officials with censorship due to the newspaper’s alleged extremism.”

Eduard Limonov, the radical opposition leader-slash-celebrity, told leading opposition radio station Ekho Moskvy (the same station Condi Rice makes a point of visiting whenever she flies into Moscow for her annual missile defense hustle) that the attack on the Exile is really an attack on Eduard Limonov—and that it’s all about him. This isn’t just a case of Limonov pulling a PR stunt: On Monday, a dozen young members of Limonov’s banned National Bolshevik Party stormed the Russian government’s Railways Ministry building in central Moscow, seizing offices, smashing open windows, and unfurling antigovernment banners in solidarity with striking railway workers. It ended as it always does: The dozen activists were hauled off, and no one knows what their fate will be.

Four years ago, a similar stunt by Limonov’s National Bolsheviks led to the arrest of nearly 50 activists, a spectacular trial, and the Russian Supreme Court banning Limonov’s party.

It’s a tough and dangerous job out here in opposition to the Kremlin. Publicity is the most prized currency: It’s generally considered your best defense against a bad fate, and since most opponents are of the public-transport-riding socioeconomic class, it’s really the only defense. Everyone knows that there’s a roughly zero percent chance of winning against The Man, but losing comes in many different forms—from glorious standoff to extinction. That’s why the opposition needs to divvy up the publicity—and the exposure—as widely as possible.

And right now, I’m part of the developing story, and I’m getting sucked into the bigger battle. Two opposition media outlets, radio station Govorit Moskva and magazine/portal New Times, want to interview me early next week about theExile in the context of a wave of audits that are sweeping the Russian provinces. (My paper’s audit is still the first one ever for a Moscow-based newspaper.) New Times made international headlines last December when one of its investigative reporters, young über-babe Natalia Morar, was expelled from Russia and labeled a threat to state security. I met Morar for lunch with another American journalist about a month before she was expelled, and I left that meeting deeply annoyed by her Tracy Flick–like ambitiousness, as well as her clear lack of sexual interest in me. But after her expulsion, well, any criticism just seems vulgar and cheap. Meanwhile, Govorit Moskva called me and asked if they could put me on a live debate next week across from the chairman of the Russian Duma’s Committee on Political Information, Valery Komissarov.

I dunno, folks! I mean, should I? Should I start wearing a helmet? Or the flack jacket that’s still in our office, a gift from the first war in Chechnya? Is there a lawyer in the house who can e-mail me a little advice on this? Or would a rabbi be more appropriate at this point?

I have no idea where all this is leading, and neither does anyone else. In the meantime, I’ve just downloaded Black Sabbath’s Paranoia album, because Black Sabbath is apparently one of Dmitry Medvedev’s favorite bands. When I listen to “War Pigs,” I’m brought back to my bong-stenched dirthead youth in the San Jose suburbs—and for the first time, those dirthead days don’t seem so bad. I wonder, what does Dmitry Medvedev think of when he listens to “War Pigs”?

*          *          *

PAYING THE KREMLIN

June 16, 2008

Today’s lesson is that even after the Russian authorities have destroyed you, they’re not satisfied; they still have to humiliate you in little ways. And even then, they’re annoyed with you.

I went to the Russian state bank and paid the 500 ruble ($22) fine to the government for all of the little administrative screw-ups in my now-defunct newspaper, the Exile, which was effectively shut down over a week ago by the authorities. The fines I paid today are completely separate from the alleged “extremism” or “drug-promotion” or “mockery of Russian traditions” that our paper is currently being investigated for. We were indeed guilty of all sorts of little errors that starched ‘n professional media types would never flub—we forgot to put in our new address, forgot to use Cyrillic fonts in the masthead, forgot to print our license number—but more than anything, we forgot to show the appropriate enthusiasm for President Medvedev, an enthusiasm which should be calibrated just a respectable notch or so below his mentor, the slightly-less-vertically-challenged Vladimir Putin.

Now that the Russian government has successfully frightened our paper out of existence, they can start working on their new spin: this had nothing to do with censorship, and everything to do with making sure that we got our address properly written down. Sort of like how Third World despots shut down opposition media outlets for “tax evasion,” rather than opposing the local Boss.

It was a strangely humiliating experience, standing in line for half an hour in a crowded, sweaty Sberbank outlet, waiting to pay the government for the pleasure of losing my newspaper of 11 years. Two meat-heads to my left almost got into a free-for-all fight over who was ahead of whom in line—cutting is a Russian tradition, and threats of violence are all part of the line-cutting ritual.

When the teller took my passport and the ticket for the fine, she froze for about 2 long minutes, clutching my US passport like it was a live wire. What’s an American doing paying a fine to the Russian government? Doesn’t Russia only levy unnecessary fines on its own citizens? What if the world found out about this?! Clearly she didn’t relish the potential scandal that this might cause. She called over her manager, and the two of them conferred for about 10 minutes, discussing whether or not accepting an American payment for a fine could turn into what Russians call “an international incident.”

My (now former) sales director Zalina tapped on the teller window and told them that they had to let me pay, that my American passport was valid and named on the ticket for the fine, and that they shouldn’t worry, it was unlikely to spark World War Four. A Gary Powers incident at most, but nothing more.

War or no war, according to a few journalists who interviewed me today, the ministry officials are starting to get seriously annoyed with me. One foreign correspondent told me that the press spokesman for the Federal Agency for Media and Communications (as it’s now called) snapped in annoyance at his questions, claiming that the audit was “completely normal,” and that I had apparently lied about it being an “unplanned audit.” So I emailed a scan of the ministry’s official notification of their audit to the reporter, on which it reads in plain Russian “Unplanned Audit.” He wrote me back, “Do they think we’re fucking morons?”

A better question would be, “Do they fucking care?”

Another Western reporter told me that when he called the ministry spokesman, that the man “exploded” and barked, “Why is everyone calling me about theExile?!” As the reporter explained, “It sounded like my call was about the 15th call he’d taken in the last hour, and he couldn’t take anymore. It was kind of funny.”

Perhaps. But pissed-off Russian bureaucrats don’t have a bygones-be-bygones habit of popping open a Miller with people who piss them off at the end of the day. When they get angry, they have a nasty habit of…actually I’d rather not think about that right now. They already made me pay this humiliating fine for a paper that they’d taken away from me.

Tomorrow I’m to be interviewed in the anti-Kremlin media outlet New Times. Meanwhile, the story is finally getting delayed coverage in the English-language print media. I’m not sure if that’s buying me some time here, or just pissing off the ministry officials even more.

*          *          *

RUSSIAN MEDIA CRACKDOWN GAINING ATTENTION

June 18, 2008

Today’s Wall Street Journal brings word of a troubling blow against press freedom in Russia: “An English-language newspaper in Moscow famed for lampooning Russian and Western officialdom has shut down after it fell under the scrutiny of the government for its raucous content. The demise of Moscow’s Exile newspaper is the latest sign of the homogenization of the press within Russia, where an official crackdown on dissent has led to the self-censorship of many publications.” Of course, that won’t come as news to you if you’ve been following Exile editor Mark Ames‘ dispatches from the front. If you’ve missed them, you can read them here.

*          *          *

WHEN A FASCIST CALLS YOU AN EXTREMIST, YOU KNOW THINGS ARE BAD

As this article is going online, I’ve either made it out of Moscow to London, or I’m stuck in a border-guard interrogation room in Sheremetyevo International Airport. Nothing will surprise me anymore. Two weeks ago, the Russian government closed down my newspaper, the Exile. And then last Thursday, during a live Moscow radio show on which I was a guest, a Putinjugend-turned-Duma deputy accused me and my newspaper of “extremism.” That might be a badge of honor for a journalist anywhere else in the world but Russia, where the word “extremist” has serious legal and extralegal implications. During Putin’s reign, the meaning of the word “extremist” was expanded to include anyone or anything who upset the Kremlin—particularly liberal critics such as the Washington-based think-tank analyst Andrei Piontovsky, who last year faced criminal charges over two books that are critical of Putin, on the grounds that they are “extremist.”

Thursday was a bad day from the minute I woke up—it started with a rude hangover, following the Exile‘s staff funeral party. Thanks to the persuasive skills of our sales girls Zalina and Lena, we managed to cop an all-expenses-paid feast at a striptease club/bordello named Violete, located directly across the river from the Kremlin. It was our way of saying “fuck you” to The Man, heavy emphasis on the “fuck.” The party rolled on from Wednesday night late into Thursday morning—and it was a very long night indeed, abandoning the slow cocktails for entire bottles of “Platinum” Russian vodka, drowning ourselves in long lugubrious toasts, then disappearing into the dark pole-dance room, where flocks of naked girls vastly outnumbering the males pile on top of you like you’re Axl Rose, and then one of them leads you farther back into Violete’s catacombs, into one of the lap dance “cabinets” for a little “extremist” activity: a 15-minute reenactment of the Mongol horde’s plunder of ancient Rus, with me as Genghis Khan and Nastya playing the war booty. The Exiledied that night just as it was born: deep in sin.

And then, in just a matter of hours, I went from Violete to hangover-nausea to the awful news that at 10 p.m. Thursday, I’d be squaring off on a live radio show against one of the most menacing creatures in the new Putin generation: Robert Schlegel, a 23-year-old ginger-haired Kremlin tool whom a girlfriend of mine described as “looking like one of those perverts from a Todd Solondz film.”

While it’s true that Schlegel has a kind of hairless-scrotum twinkie-porn look about him, when you put that into the context of his frightening “Heil Putin” politics, and the fact that he comes from Volga German stock, you start to suspect that Schlegel isn’t entirely human the way you and I are, but is rather some kind of genetically engineered Boys From Brazil product, created so that he might one day serve a cruel and scary tyrant.

And Schlegel’s aggressively enthusiastic gig has worked out pretty damn well so far: In just a few short years, he’s risen from spokesman for the Kremlin’s young goon squad organization, Nashi, which was created to harass and frighten Putin’s critics (including even Britain’s ambassador to Russia), to taking a seat this year in the state Duma, where he promptly went to work pushing through a bill that would strangle the already strangled Russian media.

When I found out that I’d be debating Schlegel, my sweat glands started to swell up and produced a ghastly odor that I can only trace to my grandfather’s ancestors from Fez. So I did my equivalent of Tooter calling for Mr. Wizard, which in my case meant calling up Eduard Limonov, the radical opposition leader whom I was sure would have an opinion on Schlegel.

“This Schlegel is just a schmuck,” Limonov said. “He’s rather intelligent, young, but very arrogant, and really he’s a fascist. And you should tell him that, too. Really, tell him that he’s a fascist schmuck, that he’s a traitor to the motherland, because he’s really a disgusting kid.”

Limonov’s party members have been violently attacked on more than one occasion by baseball-bat-wielding Nashi youths while Schlegel was acting as their spokesman, so his contempt is easy to understand. But still, an American accusing a high-profile Duma deputy of treason and fascism can be a very expensive affair these days—in more ways than one.

I arrived late at Govorit Moskva’s studio, housed in a rundown building just a few hundred yards from the Violete striptease club. I had to run up the stairwell to make it in time. My head was pounding, and I stank up the entire room with fear-sweat as I took the headphones. Luckily, Schlegel wasn’t in the studio. Russia’s Duma deputies are currently touring the provinces for a kind of “get to know the people whom you’re oppressing” ritual they do every so often, meaning Schlegel was phoning in for the show—and I wouldn’t have to look at him.

“How long will the interview last?” I asked the radio host as I put on my headphones.

“An hour, of course,” he said.

I sank in my seat. My Russian is decent enough under the right circumstances, but in the throes of a hangover, at 10 p.m., debating a fascist hothead Duma deputy with my tongue hogtied was terrifying as hell. The only question now was how to limit the damage, and make it through without completely shaming my ancestors, my country, and my profession.

Right from the start, Schlegel was extremely confident, lamenting the fact that his censorship bill, which he rammed through the Duma this past April almost unopposed on the first reading, was then rudely smacked down by President Dmitry Medvedev. Schlegel admitted with a wry laugh that indeed he had been brought to heel by the new president, and that there was no point in reintroducing the law. But he didn’t show much respect for Medvedev’s moderation, terming the veto “his opinion.”

Then it was my turn. As I explained what happened to the Exile, how the ministry inspectors frightened our investors away, leading to the newspaper’s collapse, Schlegel dismissively countered that there was nothing unusual or frightening about a Russian ministry audit of a newspaper’s article. But when I explained to him that such government audits only take place in Third World dictatorships and not in serious countries, his tone changed, and his fangs started to show.

“The Russian media is completely free,” he claimed. “Our television stations express all the opinions of the people.”

How do you respond to that? I told him that he lived in some strange parallel world separate from the world everyone else in Russia lives in; his world was some kind of formalistic fantasy land where all of Russia ran a law-abiding state; the world the rest of us saw was one in which people hid from Russia’s cruel and arbitrary powers, so when a media outlet like the Exile gets fingered, people understandably run. Schlegel didn’t take kindly to it.

When I started to talk about the shameful self-censorship that went on in the American media in the lead-up to the Iraq war, and the disastrous consequences that followed, Schlegel loudly cut me off: “The American media was right to support the invasion of Iraq, because the American people supported that war. Of course the American media should back the president!”

“But the only reason that the American people supported the war was because the media duped them! They didn’t do what they were supposed to do!” I stammered.

“No, Bush was right to invade Iraq!” Schlegel yelled. “I absolutely support his reasons for invading, and I believe the American media did the right thing in supporting the war, because the American people supported this war.”

And that’s when the young Russian Duma deputy turned his fangs on me: “I understand what type of person you are now, Mark, after listening to you and hearing about your newspaper, the Exile, on this radio program. It’s very clear to me now that you are anextremist, and your newspaper isextremist. I have never read your newspaper, but I don’t need to now because I already have you figured out. You’re an extremist. It’s all completely clear to me now.”

It was the longest hour of my life, an infuriating and exhausting experience that left me feeling corrupted. I went home late that night thinking what Schopenhauer had said about this world being hell, where men are divided into torturing devils and the condemned. Schlegel was born to be a torturing devil if there ever was one.

When I got back to my apartment, I received an e-mail notifying me that the New York–based Committee to Protect Journalists had issued an alert on my defunct newspaper’s behalf. I felt—and still feel—oddly grateful to them for throwing their weight behind our story, but I understand that it won’t do much to help me now that I’ve been labeled an “extremist” by a Russian Duma deputy; nor will it hurt Schlegel, who can say whatever he wants.

About five hours from now, as I’m sending this off to Radar, I’ll be on my way to Sheremetyevo Airport. That vacation I’ve been talking about is now long overdue.

##

Would you like to know more? Read about the Wikileaks cables on The eXile and the Kremlin crackdown.

Buy The eXile: Sex, Drugs and Libel in the New Russia co-authored by Mark Ames and Matt Taibbi (Grove).

Click the cover & buy the book!

Hello Jim, it’s your mother here. I didn’t want to write this. And I apologize for sending this to The eXiled, but I didn’t know how else to reach you. Jimmy, please listen to me just this one time. Stop embarrassing yourself. Please, I beg you. Why, a mother asks, did you write a groveling letter to Mark Ames that began, “Unlike Matt Taibbi, you’re a good writer”? Jimmy, you’re more confused today at age 50 than when I used to smack you around at age 5. You’re a talentless meathead and a failed Broadway actor with a chip on your shoulder, and it hurts me to see you flaunt it. You’re too vain, and too thick in the skull, to recognize what a complete ass you’re making of yourself today. Jimmy, you’re 50 years old. The 1990s are over. In 5 years you’ll qualify for senior citizens’ discounts. Please, Jimmy, please stop it. Stop being a masochist and hurting yourself. You aren’t a redneck. You aren’t scaring anyone. You aren’t impressing anyone. Mr. Ames seems like a nice Jewish fellow, why do you have to bother him, the way you pestered me and your father? Of course we hit you. You wouldn’t stop whining all the time. You wrote all about it in your “Rape” magazine. Clearly, I should have beaten you a lot more, Jimmy. I failed to prevent you from becoming a 50-year-old monkey, and for that I am sorry.

Please, Jimmy, stop it. Stop whining. And stop running to that nice Canadian fashionista to defend your honor. This poor Canadian fellow Gavin McInnes is a busy man, with a serious job: he looks at pictures of people’s clothes, and comments on them. That, Jimmy, is what a real redneck does: commenting on people’s clothes. This Canadian fellow Gavin, he is a real redneck, unlike you. When it comes to Canadian fashion criticism, no one takes it to the limits like Gavin McInnes. What do you do? You interrupt his busy day as a fashion critic to rescue you when you can’t defend yourself. Oh how ashamed I am to be your mother! Your father beat you to try to make a man out of you, and what did you do? You begged him for money to go to theater acting school at NYU. That’s why he drank himself to death. You killed your father, Jimmy, and you’re killing him again now.

But here’s what I really want to say to you, Jimmy, my son: Stop groveling. Please, for once in your life, stop groveling to rich Republicans. Try to be a little bit of the psychotic Jim Goad that you used to be. That was interesting. But now, you just grovel to rich Republicans. You grovel to the Koch Brothers and call yourself “libertarian” because they’re rich corporate heirs and they throw money at libertarians. You grovel to your 80-year-old Albanian publisher Taki, because he’s a rich heir, and my son Jimmy Goad grovels to rich heirs. You’re not even ashamed that you edit a magazine whose mascot is a debutante in a tiara holding a martini glass and cigarette holder, whose motto is “Cocktails, Countesses, and Mental Caviar”. I always told you as a child, “Jimmy, some day you’ll grow up and be a 50-year-old redneck who publishes in a magazine whose mascot is a debutante in a tiara, and you’ll do something really stupid like make an ass out of yourself groveling to Mark Ames for his attention. No wonder I don’t love you. I already know what a groveling idiot you’ll be when you’re 50!” Five minutes a day of not groveling to billionaire Republican rightwingers, that’s all I ask. Can you at least try it?

Yes, I know Jimmy, you’re still mad at me. I remember what you wrote about me in your “Rape” issue:

“Little Jimmy. All alone at four or five years old. Shivering on my parents’ numb bed on a Sunday morning when the old man was out drinking and mommy was off to church. I felt a chilly Novocain pit inside my ribs, the sense that I was unloved.”

I can still hear the violins playing when I read those words. Those are First Amendment-barrier-breaking violins, Jimmy. Kleenex, anyone? Oprah, book that man!

Well, since we’re opening up, let’s go back and revisit your childhood, since that’s all you ever do. That and zip-code surfing. Yes, Jimmy, you grew up a poor Confederate redneck in the bayous of Ridley Park, Pennsylvania, a rich all-white suburb of Philadelphia built as a “summer vacation resort for wealthy Philadelphians.” Growing up in the redneck backwoods of Ridley Park, you dreamed of going to NYU to be a theater actor on Broadway. But as you whined over and over in your “Rape” issue, your father didn’t pay for you to attend NYU theater acting school, “even though we could pay for it 10 times over” I suppose I should explain why, Jimmy. You see, it’s true. Like all redneck families, we had plenty of money to pay for the most expensive theater acting program in Manhattan ten times over. And like all redneck boys, you naturally dreamed of studying theater at NYU under Stella Adler, who taught Judy Garland and Melanie Griffith. Here is what you wrote in the Rape issue:

“NYU accepted me to study theater with Stella Adler, one of the world’s best acting teachers. They had enough money to pay the tuition ten times over – but they just didn’t want to bet it on me.”

O, the humanity! Poor Jimmy’s parents wouldn’t waste $150,000 on their son’s Broadway dreams. Say goodbye to that bit-part in Rent that you were destined for, Jimmy Goad. You coulda been the next Judy Garland! It’s the Redneck’s Dilemma all over again: Redneck son wants to study theater at NYU, redneck parents have the money but won’t pay it, redneck son hates parents for life. If that’s not authentic redneck, then this photo certainly is:

If only Stella Adler could see me now, she’d be so proud! Yee-haw!

It’s true, Jimmy. We didn’t want to bet on you. We knew that Temple University was more your speed. And here is one reason why. When you sent your email to Mark Ames trying to hurt him, your “grovel” program kicked in instead:

——Original Message——
From: jg@jimgoad.net
To: ames@exiledonline.com
Subject: Hello, Darlin’
Sent: Feb 22, 2011 3:08 PM

Unlike Matt Taibbi, you are a really good writer.

But you’re so absolutely wrong about everything, I’m laughing as I type.

I would bust you like a grape in a public debate.

404 824 0088 … Call me anytime in my 88 percent black neighborhood, ye champeen of the oppressed.

My poor dim-witted son, it hurts to read this email. But maybe now, reading what you wrote Mr. Ames, you’ll understand why your father and I figured Temple U. was more your speed.

Here, Mr. Ames wrote me a very nice note explaining why your email was so retarded:

“Dear Mrs. Goad, your son sent me an email challenging me to a ‘public debate’? What the hell is he talking about, ‘public debate’? Is that before or after the spelling bee? Mrs. Goad, please tell your retarded redneck son Jim Goad I don’t know how to answer a groveling email like this. I know he’s done so much groveling to the Kochs lately that it’s become an instinctive reaction for your son. If he wants to fuck with me, please tell your dumbshit failed actor of a son he shouldn’t start off his email by telling me that I’m more talented than Matt Taibbi. That’s called groveling–and handing your gun to your opponent. Even the Polish cavalry wasn’t that stupid. Since your son is a special case, here’s some friendly advice: You see, Mrs. Goad, your son should not tell me I’m better than Taibbi if he wants to hurt me. No, if he wants to hurt me, or at least give the impression he’s hurting me, your son should have written that I’m jealous of Matt Taibbi, because he’s more famous than I am. You see? I know that’s tough to figure out, but I’m in a charitable mood here. If your retarded son would take ten minutes out from playing the 50-year-old failed-Broadway-actor-turned-Confederate wigger, and take just ten seconds off from sucking up to the Koch brothers, he might learn something about the art of invective.”

And I said to Mr. Ames, “Thank you. But there’s no point in explaining this to my retarded son Jim Goad.”

So, there’s my letter to you Jimmy. I hope you heed my advice and stop embarrassing me, that’s all.

Love nips,

Jim’s Mom

ps: Mr. Ames asked me to directly relay this message to your fashion-critic handler, the fellow from Canada:

Jim,

Mark Ames here. I’m truly sorry that a 50-year-old theater-trained Confederate such as yourself has to run crying to a Canadian fashionista like Gavin McInnes, the biggest chickenshit who ever called himself a “white power” Confederate that Canada ever produced. Not sure if anyone remembers, but back in 2003, when Gavin was at the peak of his career, the New York Times quoted Gavin playing the “white power” hipster. And like the bad-assed “white power” Confederate Gavin is, the second his hipster stance turned into real controversy, a giant yellow stripe ran up his Canadian back as Gavin squealed “I’m just a hipster poseur! I didn’t mean that white power stuff! I love The Nation magazine just as much as I love Pat Buchanan! I swear I’m just a fashion chickenshit who doesn’t mean a single thing I say! I’m a pussy and a poseur, c’mon you guys!”

Here’s how Gavin portrayed himself to the New York Times:

He actually leans much further to the right than the Republican Party. His views are closer to a white supremacist’s. ”I love being white and I think it’s something to be very proud of,” he said. ”I don’t want our culture diluted. We need to close the borders now and let everyone assimilate to a Western, white, English-speaking way of life.”
In an interview in The New York Press last year, Mr. McInnes’s views came through in the coarse ethnic expressions he used in saying how pleased he was that most Williamsburg hipsters are white. As a result, he became the focus of a letter-writing campaign by a black reader. Vice apologized for Mr. McInnes’s comments.

Welp, someone got upset–someone rich, of course, because suckup posers like Gavin only care if rich people don’t appreciate his act. So at the first whiff of gunpowder, our Canadian Confederate emailed to the public one of the most shameful, embarassing mea culpas in the history of chickenshits: a long groveling letter to Gawker taking back all the edgy white power things he’d said: “No no no! Wait, I lost a client over saying something edgy! Tell everyone I didn’t mean a thing!”

It became irresistible to goad people and corner them into conversations about controversial politics because they were so hysterical and easy to anger. Plus, incendiary political statements garnered endless publicity for us and playing with mainstream media became a fun game.

And yes, I wrote an article for The American Conservative about a new trend of conservative hipsters. I did it for a laugh. I did it because I wanted to see what it would be like to flirt with Pat Buchanan (and I agree with some of what the AmCon says, just like I agree with some of what The Nation says). In the AmCon piece I made totally bullshit claims like Terry Richardson was publicly trashing Clinton and Our website was filled with people saying the gay media was making women diet too much. I even invented an art collective called Sofia. Any of these things could have been easily disproven, but everyone from The New York Post to Newsweek ran with them. Shocking really.

Gavin McInnis does the Chickenshit Shuffle: “I will say stuff so left-wing, so Black Power, that it will make your ears burn off.” Ouch, our ears!

You see what a sly little coward Gavin is? First whiff of gun powder, and he’s fleeing for the safety of irony, turning in every name he can think of, blaming the media for not being in on the hipster joke. It’s all their fault, you see! I’m just a fashionista poseur! Don’t take me seriously, please! I’m gonna give you all the Black Power you need, because this is about balance, right? Isn’t that how I save myself? By running to the other side and pretending there as much as I pretend when I’m with the White Power side?

THE EXILED PRESENTS: THE GAVIN MCINNES PLAYBOOK OF “WHITE POWER” DO’S & DON’TS!

DO: Shamelessly chicken out when you generate a single iota of real controversy, send a giant rambling knee-chattering letter to gossip site Gawker disowning everything vaguely dangerous you ever may have said that might be construed the wrong way, and to emphasize that you have no convictions or balls, send a self-debasing photo of yourself in a Speedo with your giant pussy backtracking apology letter, so that everyone will think you really are just a harmless poseur Canadian fashionista fraud, too harmless and middle-class to take your White Power stuff seriously;

DON’T: Talk White Power talk if you’re just a pussy Canadian fashionistawithout the balls to follow through on what you started.

Gavin McInnis explains why it’s cool to be a Republican: “It’s cool because it’s not cool. So therefore, it’s cool. Unless it’s bad for the career. Then it’s not cool again.”

Contrast a total poseur like Gavin with Jim Goad, who, to his credit, is at least trying to be the real thing: a guy who writes about beating up women and breaking their jaws, before actually beating the shit out of his tiny girlfriend who was half Goad’s age, and going to prison for it. Jim broke little Anne Ryan’s eye socket with his fist while she was in his car, and he bit her thumb badly enough for it to count as another charge, before throwing her out of the car in the middle of nowhere at five in the morning. That made all the hipster poseurs “oo” and “ahh” over just how authentic Goad’s redneck act was. Sure, you probably didn’t realize that Rednecks bite their girlfriends’ thumbs, but you must not have listened to your Merle Haggard enough, songs like, “Darlin’, if’n you dont git me a beer/I’m a-gonna bite-bite-bite yer thumb…”

Now, here’s what Goad wrote about violence against women:

I like to punch women and kick them and shove them up against walls. I like grabbing them by their pretty hair and swinging them into door frames, rubbing their noses in the carpet like they’re puppies, dragging them into the bathroom and half-drowning them in the toilet. Sinks—either bathroom or kitchen sinks—are real good, because you can knock out a whole row of teeth when you slam a woman’s face into one. Watch all the gooey blood dripping on the white porcelain. It’s a real treat.

Yup, that’s it. That’s the difference between Gavin and Goad. That’s what authentic Redneck is, as compared to Gavin’s poseur-redneck. No wonder they’re not embarrassed to call themselves “libertarians.”

Look, you two fools are still working the same old schtick that worked so well in the Clinton Era: flip-flopping conventional cliches and morals, hissing anti-black and anti-Semitic platitudes to imaginary “oo’s” and “ah’s” of your imaginary 90’s dorm audience. Breaking the rules and sticking it to the Establishment by parroting someone else’s older, filthier cliches, over the current cliches. But politics and ideas aren’t the same as shopping for redneck outfits at thrift stores. You’ve become so ridiculous that the great Brit satirist Christopher Morris even created a character based on Gavin named “Nathan Barley,” a shallow London media hipster who earns “cool” credibility by fake-shocking his shallow hipster friends by saying “nigger” in public, and running a hipster fashion website with the edgy name “Trashbat.co.ck.” Not “Streetboners” but “trashbat-dot-cock.” As Nathan Barley says in the show, “Get it? ‘Cock.’ Dot-co, dot-ck. Trashbat-dot-cock, my nigger!” One man’s “Streetboners” website is another man’s “co.ck” as they say in hipsterland. Click here to watch a clip from Chris Morris’ brutal takedown of Gavin McInnes. (It’s perfect, isn’t it, that Gavin is now a Koch-sucking “libertarian.”)

Goad and Goad’s handler, Gavin, never figured that out. And so even though America has changed drastically for the worse since the 1990s, the decade that Goad and Gavin still live in, neither of them know how to adapt. They’re merely calculating their stances like fashion choices, and now they’ve run out of stances and anti-stances and hipster flip-flops of conventional liberal wisdom. It was always formulaic, and a dumb formula at that. We were all a lot dumber in the 1990s because we thought the enemy was blandness—America was still rich and that wealth seemed infinite. We hadn’t been dragged into two lost wars and the total collapse of the financial system yet. So some of us got off on teasing the liberal Ms. Crabtrees, which in hindsight was far too easy, and dove into rank hedonism, because it was fun and because others were inexplicably afraid of going there. It made sense then, when America was rich and annoying liberals seemed to matter in the phony culture wars of that time. Part of the point was to make the readers uncomfortable, to shake them awake. But times have changed: this country is completely fucked thanks to the plutocrats whose shoes Goad and Gavin are now polishing with their tongues. It was inevitable that shallow hipsters would rationalize their way into the Koch brothers’ libertarian arms. Pathetic, but inevitable: someone who thinks “bold” and “daring” equals facile flip-flops inevitably winds up carrying the water for the status quo. Go back to commenting on people’s clothes, or whining about how your parents didn’t love you enough. You’re much better at that.

Update: Since this article was published, Gavin McInnes, hiding behind Jim Goad, went into a Twitter-hissy-fit, tattling “Mark Ames is a bad bad man!” to Michelle Malkin, FoxNews, Dennis Miller, Bill O’Reilly, as well as to The Nation, MSNBC, and Dylan Ratigan and Vanity Fair. Gavin McInnes using Jim Goad to tattle on Mark Ames to Dennis Miller–that’s just…sad. If you’re wondering how much of a corrupt Koch-lackey Gavin McInnes and his puppet Jim Goad are, here’s your proof: whenever they have their feelers hurt, they run tattling to FoxNews for help.

“I thought Gavin and his boy Goad could take it,” Ames says. “I didn’t realize I’d hurt them that badly. Gavin, I hope you’re not abandoning your white Confederate brother Goad, the way you always abandon them over the first whiff of gunpowder. You white-power Confederates ought to stick together, you know. For once in your life, Gavin, don’t be a rat.”

Update #2: Editors are forwarding Ames emails sent to them by Gavin McInnes, who’s been furiously campaigning to get Ames blackballed from every media outlet, using the Julian Assange smear by accusing him of being a rapist. Kids, if you’re wondering what happens to Brooklyn fashionista hipsters when they hit 40, here’s your headline: “From Fashionista Hipster to Republican Party Snitch: Gavin McInnes, you’ve come a long way, baby!”

Update #3: It gets even weirder. Gavin McInnes sent us a “tip” that his and Goad’s campaign to smear Ames through the FoxNews/rightwing echo chamber is paying off big-time: according to Gavin, Geraldo Rivera “answered our emails.” Oh no! Jerry Rivers Alert! Danger! Danger!

Mark Ames is the author of Going Postal: Rage, Murder and Rebellion: From Reagan’s Workplaces to Clinton’s Columbine and Beyond.

Click the cover & buy the book!