The FBI search of Scott Ritter’s home yesterday: a contrarian view
I have little doubt that there will be a hue and cry today among progressive humanity over the FBI’s execution of a search warrant against the very prominent activist in the Opposition movement to U.S. foreign policy, former marine and arms control inspector Scott Ritter.
Since the start of Russia’s Special Military Operation, Scott has been one of the loudest cheerleaders for the Russian forces, telling us nearly every week how Russian victory and Ukrainian capitulation are just around the corner. It is no wonder that he attracted to himself a huge public audience both in the United States and abroad.
This misleading analysis of the war I forgive him. All observers, myself included, have been left wrong-footed by the willingness of the United States and its allies to regularly escalate and change the nature of the conflict from a Russia-Ukraine conflict to a Russia-NATO war, in which new assets are wagered at the casino tables and the war is drawn out, moving with the horizon.
However, along the way Scott Ritter has made some serious errors of judgment which have led ineluctably to the present search and to his likely trial and conviction.
This is not the fate of one brave but misguided public figure that I am writing about. It is the failure by Ritter and others to understand what constitutes correct behavior with respect to the publicly identified adversary of the United States, which Russia is today just as the Soviet Union was in the days of the first Cold War. I write to inform a new generation of activists where the red lines are and what to avoid lest they fall victim as Ritter has and similarly discredit the Opposition.
Ritter hanged himself when he acknowledged last night in a video released on the internet that he had accepted ‘compensation’ from both RT and Sputnik, which are news outlets financed by the Russian government.
That likely will not be the sole charges against him for violating the Foreign Agent Registration Act (FARA) when his case goes to court. He also accepted travel to Russia and within Russia paid for by Russian hosts, first a publisher of one of his books in a Russian language edition and then by a group of extreme nationalists linked to the philosopher-political activist Dugin. Their financial arrangements with the Russian government are opaque. This also showed willful disregard for propriety and for the journalist’s obligation to be objective. That Ritter’s objectivity had been compromised was perfectly evident from his glowing reports on Russia upon his return to the United States.
No country has a monopoly on stupidity. There is plenty to go around for all of mankind. And the existence of RT is a perfect demonstration of the occasional blindness of the Russian government. Its director Margarita Simonyan is a brilliant public speaker with a phenomenal memory for quotations from Russian poetry that she uses to add depth to her appearances on television. However, the RT project that she has overseen represents a misallocation of Russian state funds and failure to exploit Russia’s news gathering manpower properly.
From the very start, RT positioned itself as a mirror to America, with programs prepared and delivered by has-been U.S., Canadian and other English speaking journalists. The results were second rate in terms of quality and misguided in mission. Mirrors to America’s blemishes and rot are better held up by Americans in country, not by the country’s adversary. More importantly, RT never exploited the wealth of material right under its nose within the state’s Russian language broadcasting to its domestic audience. It would have better served Russia’s reputation in the world if the high quality news broadcasts of Vesti and the top quality political talk shows like The Great Game or Evening with Vladimir Solovyov were either re-broadcast with English voice-over or with English subtitles. This was never done.
The Russians also have been foolish in their organization of the annual Valdai Conference gatherings in which, prior to CO VID and to the Special Military Operation when travel to Russia became impossible, they year after year invited Russia-haters like Angela Stent of George Washington University to come, take the microphone and have their photos taken with Vladimir Putin for later display on their desks back in their university. By these invitations, the Russian leadership only lent credibility to an enemy.
But to come back to Ritter: my drawing red lines against accepting compensation or ‘favors’ from Russian state news broadcasters is not a rule that I came to by myself. It was given to me by an icon of the Opposition movement in the United States going back several decades, professor Steve Cohen. For more than two years, I was in daily contact with Cohen as from 2015 when we jointly created the American Committee for East-West Accord. During this period, Cohen was invited to Russia to take part in the Valdai conferences but declined the invitation because he considered it dead wrong to take travel and expenses from the Russian hosts lest he expose his flanks to ridicule and attack by American patriots. Stent had nothing to fear in this regard considering her stream of anti-Putin, anti-Russian publications. But for Cohen, it would discredit the movement. This, alas, is precisely what Scott Ritter has done.
©Gilbert Doctorow, 2024