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Thursday, September 07, 2006

Intelligent.ru: A Festival of Crazed Russopilia

If you check out the English language version of the Russophile blog "Intelligent.ru" (a misnomer if there ever was one) on Technorati, you will find that the blog itself isn't even listed there and has only been linked to 20 times by blogs that are listed, mainly the the wacko Russophile blogs "Russian Blog" and "Russia Blog." (La Russophobe for instance has been linked to more than 150 times). That's a good thing, because if people were paying any attention to the crazed propaganda found on this blog, they'd be walking around in a fog of ignorance.

If you check out the biography of one of Intelligent's "authors" (to use the blog's term), Mike Averko, you will learn that he "has served as a consultant for several mainstream American news shows." Interestingly, no mention is made here of Mr. Averko's claim, documented previously on La Russophobe, that he is a commentator published in the likes of the New York Times (as La Russophobe is shown, all he's ever done is write letters to the editor). Oddly, Mr. Averko doesn't care to mention which "news shows" he has "consulted" on -- perhaps because that would make it too easy to ridicule him (or expose him as a liar), and he doesn't identify himself as a TV consultant when he writes for Russia Blog (there, he's a Times columnist). This sort of thing is the classic hallmark of the Russophile propagandist, namely the total absence of any obligation to dwell in the real world, source facts or otherwise substantiate claims. This is the way business was done in the USSR, and it's why the USSR doesn't exist any more.

Other "authors" at Intelligent include Russia Blog's Yuri Mamchur, Russophile extremist Sharon Tennison and wacko Russophile nutjob Kirill Pankratov. Pankratov is not only a scientist but also a writer/pornographer: his website refers to his Russian prose collection by warning "ranging from lyrical to erotic (very explicit, a warning should be added)." Naturally, he's a qualified expert in political affairs, and a regular contributor to that bible of authoritative analysis the eXile, and the author of a really bizarre stream-of-consciousness blabbering article called "America Your Time is Up" on the People's Voices blog. Mamchur, by contrast, touts his being a "graduate of the Russian Tax Academy School of Law in Moscow" as previously discussed by La Russophobe. Tennison is "president of the Center for Citizen Initiatives, USA and Russia." Wikipedia says of her: "President Sharon Tennison is a political pragmatist, favoring the rapprochement of U.S.-Russia relations at the expense of debate on divisive topics including human rights and political freedom issues." She has written a staunch defense of KGB spy Vladimir Putin. It's argued that the Wikipedia article about her has been planted by a sycophant and is not reliable. Note that it's just fine for all these people to hate and scathingly attack America, but if anyone dares to reciprocate where Russia is concerned then they are of course a "bigot" and "racist" (even though Russia isn't a race but nationality, a fact they never tire of ignoring).

If you review the current contents of Intelligent you find a remarkable barrage of Russophile propaganda. First there's Yuri Mamchur's attack on the Wall Street Journal's coverage of the extremism law, already thoroughly discredited on La Russophobe and for which Mamchur apologized on Russia Blog. Then there's the "editor's column" by Intelligent's English version boss, Sergei Roy. Roy is identifed as a linguist. Here's what this crazed, hysterical Russophile has to say about the President of Georgia:

Recently, seven leading medical institutions (Norway’s Tonsberg Psychiatric Center; Norway’s National Institute of Public Health; Germany’s Center for Diseases of the Nervous System at Christian Albrecht University; the Psychiatric Department of Geneva University; Vienna Medical School’s Department of Psychoanalysis and Psychotherapy; Finland’s Psychiatric Department; and Amsterdam University’s Department of Clinical Psychology) were asked to evaluate Georgian President Saakashvili’s mental health. The evaluation excerpts published in various oppositionist papers in Georgia describe Saakashvili as a negative and aggressive person with extreme egocentricity, a hysteroid typetending toward megalomania and an obsessive or maniacal syndrome characterized by a personal conviction of being destined to be the “chosen one,” etc. etc. There’s lots of this psychiatric gobbledegook in the published materials, but the diagnosis is clear enough: “Expansive type of paranoid dysfunction (according to ICD-IO) combined with narcissist type of hysteroid personality.” Beautiful. To me, it translates into one brief word: psycho
If you look in a Russophile dictionary, you will see that the definition of "psycho" is anyone who opposed Russian hegemony.

Reviewing the other current contents of Intelligent we find an article bashing Israel, accusing the U.S. Congress of insulting Russia's dignity by daring to discuss Russian imperalism, touting Russia's wonderful success at the G-8 Summit (where it got booted out of the WTO and confronted by several world leaders on its human rights record), attacking the U.S. for "disastrous" new Cold War policies and begging the world to "give the Bear some time." Time for what? Time to consolidate dictatorial power and try again to enslave the world? Intelligent also, not surprisingly, published the crazed tirade of Professor Steve Cohen already thoroughly discredited on La Russophobe.

La Russophobe thinks Intelligent is a perfect example of insular Russian and Russophile on-lookers firing bits of propaganda back and forth between themselves and imagining, just as did the members of the old Politburo, that they are conclusively proving their own superiority. All the while, Russia continues sinking into a morass of incompetence and corruption from which it likely will never emerge.

Who funds Intelligent? The website doesn't say, nor does it say that it's a charitable enterprise. Does its money come from the Kremlin? From Yuri Mamchur's Discovery Institute? La Russophobe intends to explore the matter further.

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