Comment by kutakbash | Hacker News Reader

Comment by kutakbash | Hacker News Reader

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>which runs a sideline business in murdering inconveniently critical journalists

Not trying to defend Russian govt (which is without a doubt pretty sinister), but this 'journalist murdering' thing that pops up every time Westerners discuss Russian internal policy is a bit off the mark. The way you say it cues that all Russian media is pro-government and Russian citizens en masse are either brainwashed drones or impregnable oppositional free-thinkers. While in fact its only TV which is thoroughly controlled by the government. Russian press is pretty vocal and most of it is clearly critical of the United Russia party policy. More so Russian online press — I don't know a single popular online news outlet which isn't critical of United Russia (modestly or very much so). Sure there are a couple of high profile murder cases that may be linked to Russian govt, but list of murdered journalists found in wiki is in its entirety composed either of people died in 90s or people whose death may (or may not) be connected with provincial level oligarchs, especially on North Caucasus. So saying that murdering journalists is what Russian govt does is just not true. It is true that govt doesn't provide them with utmost security though.

Why do I even care? Because you guys could be more critical of real and serious United Russia's wrongdoings (like prosecution of a row of activists involved in protests of 2011-2), instead of reiterating on secondary matters like journalist murders (ostensibly committed by government) or gay rights.

I hope I will not have to change accounts after this post.

I don't know what to tell you here, given that the whole premise of my comment was to separate the Russian people from the Russian government.

It's not really proven that Russian government murders journalists. Though. Which is the whole premise of my comment.

Look at this list:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_journalists_killed_in_R...

Tell me that anything remotely like this has happened in the US or Western Europe.

Reading that list, it almost feels like murdering a Russian journalist is what one does instead of sending an angry letter to the editor.

Yeah, I see that link come up pretty often. First off, does it really make sense to attribute to government each and every journalist who was killed, for whatever reason? Including sports reporter, including the guy from press service of the Moscow Region governor? Mind you, homicide rate in Russia is twice as high as that of the US.

Sure, it looks like government isn't providing them (and everyone else, for that matter) with enough security, but it's nothing like saying it deliberately murders them. The most hard evidence for me is that Russian press itself doesn't put much emphasis on it.

Just so we can be clear about where we stand: the Russian government murders journalists. You'd have to present pretty clear, coherent, and surprising evidence to get me to believe otherwise. That's not helpful in an "orderly resolution of message board debate" sense, I know, but I wouldn't want to give the impression that I was endorsing this question as a meaningful debate. The Russian government murders journalists; it's literally part of their M.O.

So somehow Russian government is unworthy of presumption of innocence? Or it is guilty as long as dominant discourse asserts it is? Once again, Russian government is not responsible for murdering journalists, there is no firm evidence it is. Certainly not for most of people on that list on the wiki.

Even if I believed that judgements on nations must use the same jurisprudential mechanisms as criminal trials of individuals, and even if I overlooked the fact that the Russian criminal justice system doesn't fundamentally respect presumption of innocence (no surprise, given the legacy of the Soviet system), I am not an agent of a court and am in absolutely no way bound to presume anything about anybody.

That's a bit dodgy of you. Presumption of innocence is obviously used colloquially here.

About Politkovskaya and Litvinenko:

The version about Politkovskaya murder I find the most plausible is that her murder is linked with Putin's ally and appointed president of Chechnya Kadyrov. Before her death she was working on human rights violations in Chechnya, including torture. In fact, you can still find her last interview about it on Novaya Gazeta (newspaper she worked for) website, dated 9th October of 2006. What Russian government did here is covering Kadyrov and finding scapegoats who are supposed to represent Chechen 'terrorists' (opposed to Kadyrov and Russian govt). Torture committed by federal and local pro-Russian forces is still a reality in North Caucasus, just about a year ago there was a story on it in 170 thousands readers strong Russian Reporter Magazine. Western press didn't seem to give due attention to the cause Politkovskaya died for, instead preferring, as usual, to focus on apparently more important issues such as gay people forbidden to proclaim their sexuality in public. At least no one has died over that story yet.

Litvinenko case is a weird one. So he is some sort of whistleblower who apparently disclosed Putin's inside job and had to die due to Polonium poisoning. The story goes like this: Litvinenko has disclosed Putin's inside job (which most likely isn't an inside job, basically it's a Russian equivalent of 9/11-as-an-inside-job story), so FSB had to make him painfully die almost in a Sicilian mafia fashion. I am not a Western layman so I don't automatically deem crazy everyone who happened to be in power and at the same time to the East from certain meridian. I see why Sicilian mafia would kill somebody after the fact: it doesn't care much about publicity and it doesn't want to be betrayed once again. But I don't see why would Putin do that, he deeply cares about his perception in the West (as long as it doesn't meddle with his authoritative pretensions and support of his electorate) and he doesn't often blow up houses (if at all). Since the word already spread and you could buy a book in Putin-blows-up-houses genre in any Russian kiosk that sells cigarettes, yellow rags and pulp fiction, killing the man responsible for that in such a bizarre fashion (poisoning someone with radioactive materiel is in the same basket with feeding someone to their pet bear, between two shots of vodka, saying 'Na zdorovje, tovarishchi') is acknowledgement of guilt. Tldr if Putin did kill Litvinenko, it was the most stupid thing he did in his entire career.

I think you meant to reply to this comment:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6504843

Russia murders journalists, the US murders civilians who happen to be walking down the wrong street in Yemen, Iraq, Afghamistan or Pakistan. I really don't understand at all how you can claim one of those is morally superior to the other.

Is there some cultural convention in the US that I don't understand whereby murdering (white) journalists is really really wrong and never possibly justifiable but murdering (arab) children is a perfectly acceptable part of the rough and tumble of geopolitics? Otherwise I don't understand your narrow focus on journalists.

As an aside, it's not like the US never deliberately targets journalists: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Al_Jazeera#Death_of_Tareq_Ayyo...

Yeah, that sounds exactly the same as picking out Anna Politkovskaya and having her shot to death in the lobby of her apartment building.

I've got no trouble making a distinction between killing someone because of a mistake or even because of negligence and killing someone deliberately because they are writing things that are inconvenient to you. Come to think of it, neither does the law; the law has made that distinction since the middle ages. It calls one of those "murder", and the other something else.

Politkovskaya case is attributed to her activity in Chechnya, which falls under 'provincial oligarchs' rubric I mentioned upthread. That's pretty bad, but that's not the government still.

Both Politkovskaya and Litvenenko (of "death by polonium poisoning administered in London" fame) are most notorious for promoting the theory that the Russian FSB in general and Putin particularly were responsible for a series of apartment bombings in Russia that killed hundreds of people and formed the casus belli for the Chechen War.

So, attributing their death to "Chechnya" is a little like attributing a hypothetical murder of Sy Hersh to the Iraqis.

Shorter: no, I think you're wrong about this.

Don't hide behind the law, it won't help you here. If you set fire to a building with people inside and they are killed that is murder because any person knows what can happen when you set fire to a building full of people. Such it is with launching drone strikes on family homes or town streets or marketplaces or restaurants. It is murder. No sane person bombs a home without the expectation that anybody inside or nearby may be killed. Calling those deaths accidental is a sick joke.

The law doesn't have a specific term for people who just have a callous indifference to the lives of others, but people throughout human history have used a lot of terms to describe such people. Today I will use the term 'scum'.

We can't even agree on the meanings of words, so I think the prospects of us productively debating politics are dubious.

What does this list prove exactly and how? Why are these deaths attributed to the government, and not higher levels of crime in Russia? Do you know something that everyone else doesn't or you just like this idea? Also, why do you refer to the second part of the list? Or those killed when "Friend Boris" was in power don't count?

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