text: Mar 22, 2024
  It is no secret that the ruling class upholds its dominant ideology through a number of methods. One of which is the use of self-proclaimed “experts” on a given topic, to present a key point of ruling class ideology as a non-ideological universal truth.
  Anti-Russia sentiment is central to the ideology of the US ruling class, so they feature many “Russia experts” in their media outlets to reinforce this negative bias in the consciousness of their audience. Many “experts” have lied to the American people before – their job is not necessarily to tell the truth, but rather to defend bourgeois class interests – so we must question everything that they tell us.
  Mike McFaul Jokes - Diplomats are lying????
  Former US ambassador to Russia, Michael McFaul, finds it hilarious that “our diplomats are lying all the time.”
  Timothy Snyder: A Trusted but Untrustworthy Historian
  Perhaps one reason why Timothy Snyder has gotten away with lying is because he has not yet been caught laughing on camera about it. Among western bourgeois academia, Snyder is widely seen as the leading expert on the USSR during the Stalin era. Snyder’s book Bloodlands: Europe between Hitler and Stalin has received praise from every corner of the bourgeois media landscape, likely because his work feeds into its prevailing narrative that Hitler and Stalin were both equally murderous and evil.
  Fortunately, at least one historian was not willing to blindly accept what Snyder wrote in Bloodlands. In his book Blood Lies, Grover Furr argues that every single claim Snyder makes about Stalin is incorrect. Snyder unsurprisingly dismissed Furr as a Stalinist and "not really a scholar in the field,” possibly hoping that nobody would actually take the time to read Blood Lies and engage with Furr’s factual arguments.
  Blood Lies peruses the sources cited in Bloodlands, revealing how the "expert" Snyder massaged his data. For some references, Snyder left out key information that contradicts his claims. Snyder cites Nazis and Nazi collaborators as sources, without identifying them as such. Furr also uncovers basic errors that would've sunk a high school history paper: Snyder incorrectly cites page numbers, statistics, and figures from real sources, while inventing other sources completely out of whole cloth.
  Snyder falsely claimed that Putin is the only option that Russian voters are allowed to choose on the ballots in this year's election.
  Bill Browder: Red Diaper Grandbaby turned Vulture Capitalist
  During the Second World War, Earl Browder used his position as General Secretary of the Communist Party USA to advocate for close cooperation between his country and the Soviet Union. Today, his grandson Bill Browder occasionally pops up in western media outlets to express his disdain for the former Soviet Republic. This may lead one to ask: where exactly did Bill Browder’s rabid Russophobia come from?
  When interviewed by Newsweek in 2017, Browder explained that his decision to renounce his American citizenship in 1998 was because the persecution of his American Communist grandfather and Russian Communist grandmother during McCarthyism had given him a “bad feeling about the rule of law.”
  While it may be amusing to theorize that Bill then began hating Russia to spite Grandma and Grandpa, this explanation seems unlikely. His investments in Russia, however, better explain this resentment.
  Eighty years after his grandfather stood with the Soviet Union against Nazi Germany, Bill Browder stands with Ukrainian Nazis against Russia.
  While mass privatization of formerly collective property in Russia was causing millions of Russians to fall into unemployment and despair, Bill Browder saw an investment opportunity. In 1996, he co-founded Hermitage Capital Management, which later became “the largest foreign portfolio investor in Russia.”
  Browder’s investment fund lined his pockets with millions of dollars a year; in 2006, he earned an estimated £125-150 million GBP (roughly equivalent to $64-77 million USD in December 2006).
  Unfortunately for Browder, these profits would not last.
  In June 2007, two years after Browder had been denied reentry into Russia, the Moscow offices of Hermitage and its law firm were raided by law enforcement, and Hermitage holding companies were seized. It was discovered that they had embezzled over $230 million from the Russian treasury.
  Sergei Magnitsky, an auditor for Hermitage, was promptly arrested in November 2008 and died in prison in the following year. Browder claims that Magnitsky “had uncovered a tax scandal” and was murdered by the Russian government in retaliation, but an article from Der Spiegel argues that Browder never adduced evidence to support either claim.
  Browder’s lack of evidence did not stop the US government from passing the Magnitsky Act in 2012, imposing sanctions on individuals rumored to have been involved in Magnitsky’s death. The US ruling class is less concerned with whether Browder’s statements were true than with how they can be weaponized against Russia, which is why American capitalist-controlled media considers him among their favorite “Russia experts.”
  If Browder's concocted narrative was swallowed uncritically and used to justify sanctions, why would he ever stop being a paid liar?