Jeremy Sher FACEBOOK
When it comes to Russia, my dad happens to be someone who knows what he’s talking about. And I must say, Julian Assange has got quite a spotlight on Hillary Clinton (news flash: “her instincts can be terrible”). Next thing you know, Assange will publish an embarrassing revelation that Michelle Obama likes vegetables. But has this supposedly progressive Wikileaks lifted a finger against Russia? China, as China clamps down internal Internet control and rolls out an obscene numerical social-rating system? Where’s Wikileaks? And let me just add Wikileaks to my list of people and entities that one would expect to criticize Putin but don’t: that makes Netanyahu, Trump, Assange. I think my dad has a point. It’s called intelligence and Putin is personally very good at it.
Russia accumulates influence in order to argue to the world that democracy is a pipe dream and those who support it are self-righteous hypocrites. Putin’s strategic goals can only be secured when that kind of thinking prevails. And in order to build a world consensus against democracy, you need willing accomplices, and you need useful idiots. I don’t know which of those categories Netanyahu, Trump and Assange fall into, but the only thing the three of them may have in common is that they are Putin’s willing accomplices and/or useful idiots in his quest to undermine faith in democracy and the idea of rights.
This doesn’t have a lot to do with Cohen’s article, but rather with what my dad wrote about it.
And here’s what my dad wrote (I can never figure out why Facebook sometimes shares this automatically and sometimes not):
Lemme ask you a few questions, Dear Readers, about WikiLeaks. Have you ever wondered why WikiLeaks never releases documents from authoritarian leaders? Have you ever seen a single WikiLeak document that originated in the Russian government? Have you heard that Chuck Todd has stated that WikiLeaks is effectively “an arm of the Russian government”? Have you ever wondered why Ed Snowden ended up seeking asylum in Russia, given its terrible record of secrecy, suppressing dissent, and official misinformation that’s begun to rival that of its Soviet legacy? Huh? Have you ever wondered if the Russian government of Vladimir Putin, which is based on the principle of rule by corruption and legalizing criminal enterprises, and which runs state-sponsored malicious hacking and cyberwarfare on an unprecedented scale, has any relationship to, not to mention some kind of sponsorship of, WikiLeaks?
Now, if you think this is all the product of a demented, conspiratorial mind, let me tell you a brief story. When Jeremy Sher was a teenager, he traveled to Russia for a couple of weeks with some local high-school math geeks to sample Russian math education, which is simply the best in the world. In Moscow, he stayed with a host family. A few months later, on one of my 64 trips there, I visited them at their home. Lovely people. Since I speak Russian, we had a nice conversation. I asked them what they did. They said that they were computer programmers who worked in a secret institute (they called it a “yashchik,” which is Soviet/Russian code for such a place, literally a post-office box.) They smiled; I smiled. Then they introduced me to their dog. They named him Norton. Any questions? Believe it.
