Russia through Western & Chinese eyes: a Study in Contrasts

"We Strengthen Our Friendship In The Name of Peace And Happiness!"

Cross linked with 44 Days .

[box type="bio"] Welcome to the new Moscow-Beijing Express, on The Saker, which will be reporting periodically on Russian-Chinese news and perspectives. (Note: Jeff is also sending special dispatches to The Greanville post, and a "Letter from Beijing" will run periodically in the near future. In addition, a new radio section will accommodate many of his audios.—Eds.) [/box] 

[dropcap]I[/dropcap]f you have not already done so, it is highly recommended to read the following interview between The Saker and Jeff J. Brown. It’s a great primer on Sino-Russian relations, past, present and future. 

It is always interesting to see the triangular interpretation of current events, between the West, China and Russia. An excellent, recent case to consider is Russia’s new law passed, to severely increase the oversight of foreign NGOs inside Russia, as well as the monitoring of these NGOs’ local partners. (See also: Wanted: NGO whistleblowers . )

This new law was passed in the Duma (Russia’s legislative body) and sent to President Vladimir Putin, for his imprimatur. Mr. Putin wasted no time in signing it into law, on May 23rd.

The Western corporate media was, as expected, apoplectic. Disregarding the more rabid MSM megaphones on America’s payroll, take a few minutes to read this article by The Guardian, a supposedly liberal, anti-establishment news organ. (http://www.theguardian.com/world/2015/may/19/russia-bans-undesirable-international-organisations-2016-elections or, better, see our annotated addendum.) 

Former CIA Director William Casey stated the obvious, when he said,

"The CIA owns everyone of any significance in the major media."

A thoughtful analysis of this article clearly demonstrates that the CIA/MI6 editorial and journalistic puppeteers at The Guardian are large and in charge. This is a chilling example of deft censorship and psyops propaganda behind the Great Western Firewall. Its Orwellian language is parsed to perfection. For Newspeak, it approaches the level of art. No wonder 99% of Westerners are oblivious, brainwashed.

Two observations are salient. The whole mien of the article craftily puts all the blame on the Russians, demonizes President Putin, while trying to come across as “objective” and “balanced”. The other obvious Western corpse hidden behind the Great Western Firewall is the words, “color revolution”. Obviously, The Guardian’s editors and journalists have been given their marching orders by their CIA/MI6 masters: never associate Western NGOs with color revolutions. Verboten. (Note: For a complete discussion of the color revolution model, see Andrew Korybko's article on the topic, The Color Revolution Model: An Exposé of Its Core Dynamics.)

Not so in Sinoland (China). As far back as 2009, Baba Beijing (my wry appellation for China’s leadership) published its Notice on Issues Related to the Administration of Foreign Currency Contributions to Mainland Entities. It was specifically designed to limit and track the money flowing from outside China, to foreign and domestic NGOs. Nor was China the first. Baba Beijing was undoubtedly inspired by Eritrea, “Africa’s Cuba”, which has been all over Western NGOs, like stink on manure, since the early 90s. Recently, Eritrea finally just kicked them all out. There, take that, you regime changing miscreants. And Eritrea was undoubtedly inspired by Cuba and other go-it-alone countries, like North Korea, which eschew Western NGOs and vice versa. And the inspirational motherlode? They all surely go back to Communist USSR and China, the twin towers of anti-Western Empire.

The constant threat of war by the American empire has compelled China and Russia to integrate their defence architecture to deter military adventurism that could easily lead to a nuclear war.  (Soviet era poster, Sino-Russo Alliance.)

In the interim, India, taking its cue from China, passed its 2010, Foreign Contribution Regulation Act, which was not coincidently similar to China’s law. At this point, a virtuous vortex of anti-Western NGO-itis began to manifest itself. Russia knows a good thing when it sees it, so the Siberian Giant signed a law in November, 2012, that in retrospect was too weak (it was ironically based on America’s anti-communist Foreign Agents Registration Act). But that was before a little thing called fascist genocide got perpetrated on its southwestern flank, in the Ukraine. Time to get ugly.

So now, in 2015, it is Russia’s turn to stir the vortex even faster. Hence, its very draconian, nanometer-wiggle-room-for-NGOs law passed last month. So, then what happened? China liked what it sees in Russia, doesn’t like what it sees in Venezuela, the Ukraine and the US just appointing Richard Miles, Serbia’s and Georgia’s color revolution mastermind, as head of mission in Kyrgyzstan. This small but incredibly strategic Muslim country is sandwiched between China and Kazakhstan, a neighboring brother in anti-Empire arms.

So, before Putin’s signature could even dry, China’s National People’s Congress (NPC) proposed a law that, lo and behold, is almost identical to the Duma’s. I think Russia and China probably share a notebook now, in their respective political libraries, called, Killing Western Color Revolutions in their NGO Cradles. China’s proposed law is up for public comments and the G7 goons will surely lodge complaints. But given just how corrupting and dangerous the West’s whole NGO racket is for any country and its people, who elect not to be America’s prostitutes, I will be surprised if this Chinese bill does not pass, with at most, minor modifications.

Also, a couple of days after this law was proposed, the NPC rolled out its new national security bill. The fact that these two bills were submitted almost simultaneously is undoubtedly not an accident. The Chinese are masters of subtle symbolism (undoubtedly inspired by their unique, ideographic language) and the message here is Confucian clear: Western NGOs are antithetical to China’s national security interests.

Since Langley and Vauxhall Cross are as obtuse as 179 degree angles, would somebody please point this out on their Facebook accounts? Thanks, and tell ‘em 44 Days and The Saker sent you.

Back to the differences between the Great Western Firewall’s Orwellian manipulation of vocabulary, compared to Russia and China, this article in the Chinese media is fairly typical. Its title says it all: Russia promulgates an “Undesirable Organizations Law” to defend against “Color Revolutions”. 

First, Dorothy, Toto’s mysterious, sudden death? Sorry to break the news, but it was not due to natural causes. Secondly, Miss Ruby Slippers, Western NGOs and color revolutions go together like Molotov cocktails and rooftop snipers. Or if you live in Odessa, the fascists just stand there for the whole world to watch in broad daylight, as they gun down and club innocents to death.

During the Odessa massacre of pro-Russian activists, the right-wing goons torched the union building where they had sought refuge, blocked the exists, and proceeded to murder systematically anyone who had escaped the fires. This is one of the results of the harmless sounding Western NGO's work in targeted nations. In the image, a pregnant woman had her throat slit besides being shot. Nice way to advance democracy, boys, via Fascist thugs. 

Russian leaders and representatives routinely get full treatment in the Chinese media. Here is an article listing all the meetings ever had between Xi and Putin, just in case you were counting. I know I was. The title says, Xi Jinping, arriving in Russia to meet Putin; during the last two years they have met 11 times. Priceless. http://news.qq.com/a/20150509/003754.htm

Here is a video of President Putin’s comments about America’s extrajudicial arrest of the FIFA officials and it includes images from Moscow, toward the end (sorry, in China there are ads too). http://tv.cntv.cn/video/C10336/a9b513408b4a493694fabe02a34b5408 The title says, America is trying to take the 2018 World Cup away from Russia. No nuanced Newspeak there. Obama is lucky to get 15 seconds on CNN. Putin gets a full two minutes on CNTV. This was watched by untold millions on the evening news and will stay on the Chinese internet for posterity. Putin is on Chinese TV frequently, same dance, second verse.

There are a billion Chinese with mobile phones and they are hardcore social media junkies (what did my neighbors do before 3G?). Photos like this one, with only a byline,  get passed around at the speed of light, on Wechat, Sina Weibo, Tencent Weibo, QZone, Pengyou, QQ, Douban, Renren, Kaixin and literally tens of other platforms that Westerners have never even heard of. Pictures really can convey a thousand words and images like this get transmitted hundreds of millions of times a day all across China. This one’s title says, Russian President Putin Meets with Yang Jiechi. It sure looks to me like they had plenty to talk about.

A search for “Russia”, in Chinese, on Baidu (China’s behemoth answer to Google) generates up to 100,000,000 hits.  

Please note the number of hits does fluctuate on Baidu, depending on the algorithm of the moment and from where you are searching.

“Putin”, in Chinese, racks up 3,300,000-24,100,000 hits. 

“Lavrov”, 334,000-610,000 references. Not bad for a foreign minister.   And “Medvedev”, whose portfolio has been less concerned with Sino-Russian relations, 262,000 hits.  

Even Dmitry Peskov, Putin’s press spokesperson, bags an impressive 53,600-420,000 hits. 

Trust me, Saker and 44 Days fans, Baba Beijing has Russia’s back and makes sure its citizens know all about it. Not reading a word of the Cyrillic alphabet, I trust this is all reciprocal in Russia.

ADDENDUM | annotated by TGP editors where necessary. Reproduced here in toto, including image, in order to present exactly the way this material was distributed to world audiences.
ANNOTATIONS IN LINE AND RED.

Russia bans 'undesirable' international organisations ahead of 2016 elections

Human rights groups fear law, which could cover businesses as well as NGOs, is being adopted early to quash opposition to Kremlin (Tendentious phrasing, suggesting a lack of freedom and a return to "heavy-handed Soviet times", which is far from the case. Not to mention the legislation is long overdue and anything like these NGOS have been doing would never be permitted in the USA.)

Russian president Vladimir Putin at a meeting at the Kremlin on Tuesday. Russia’s parliament has passed a law banning ‘undesirable’ international organisations. Photograph: Tass / Barcroft Media

Alec Luhn, The Guardian (UK)

(Tuesday 19 May 2015 14.10 EDT
Last modified on Tuesday 19 May 2015)

Russia’s parliament has passed a law banning “undesirable” international organisations, raising fears of a further crackdown on voices critical of the Kremlin. (Blanket attack, again suggests that there is no dissent alive in Russia and that, under Putin, the government is systematically stifling critical voices.)

According to the legislation, the prosecutor general and foreign ministry can register as undesirable any “foreign or international organisation that presents a threat to the defensive capabilities or security of the state, to the public order, or to the health of the population”.

Blacklisted groups will be forbidden from operating branches or distributing information in Russia and banks will have to notify the prosecutor general and justice ministry of any financial transfers involving them. Although the language of the threat posed was vague, the bill’s authors suggested that international NGOs often work in the interests of foreign intelligence agencies. (This is actually a well-documented fact, as most recently the case of Ukraine painfully illustrates.)

The legislation was passed in its third and final reading on Tuesday by a vote of 440 to three, with one deputy abstaining. Before it becomes law, it must be approved by the upper house of parliament and signed by the president, Vladimir Putin, steps that are all but guaranteed.

Putin has frequently named NGOs as a threat to national security. “Western special services continue their attempts at using public, non-governmental and politicised organisations to pursue their own objectives, primarily to discredit the authorities and destabilise the internal situation in Russia,” Putin told senior officials of the federal security service in March. “They are already planning their actions for the upcoming election campaigns of 2016-18.” (Putin is right in all these assertions, although they are cunningly marshaled here as if he was dreaming up pretexts.)

The goal of the legislation, according to co-sponsor Alexander Tarnavsky, is to “denote that there are foreign organisations that are unfriendly to Russia,” state news agency Tass reported. “Today is such a time when it’s impossible not to notice that some foreign organisations that don’t conduct themselves in the best manner,” Tarnavsky said. “They do this for different reasons, some at the request of intelligence services, some on the basis of other considerations.”

Human Rights Watch and Amnesty International have condemned the legislation as a “draconian attack on civil society” and the presidential human rights council said it was unconstitutional. The terms in the law are ambiguous enough that it could also be applied to commercial organisations, according to an analysis by the news outlet Meduza. (And why not? Commercial organizations have long been utilized as Trojan Horses, convenient cover for CIA activities.  The record is plentiful.) 

Although groups such as Human Rights Watch could be declared undesirable under the legislation, the group’s Russia director Tanya Lokshina said the bill’s real target was not foreign businesses or international NGOs, but the Russian groups and activists that work with them. She said it was probably being adopted ahead of time to stem any dissent that could arise around next year’s parliamentary elections. (Again the same innuendo about approaching dictatorship.)

“The law appears to be designed for select application; it’s likely it will be implemented against organisations that are critical of the government and then their Russian friends and partners,” Lokshina said. “I think the law is aimed at suffocating Russian civil society, cutting them off from their international partners, leaving them in limbo.”  (Corporate journalists always find the perfect quote from the innumerable assets cultivated by the West, who oblige with the kind of testimony calculated to produce the maximum alarm in Western publics, conditioned, like Pavlovian dogs, to go into defense/hostile anxiety mode at the first sign of the seeded tripwire words or terms. Lokshina is certainly a witting or unwitting dupe in these campaigns, a type of person living in multipolar nations well described in a companion article to this post, Wanted: NGO Whistleblowers, by Andrew Korybko.)

An individual found guilty of “participation in the activities” of a blacklisted organisation can be fined between 5,000 and 15,000 roubles (£200), officials can be fined between 20,000 and 50,000 roubles and organisations can be fined between 50,000 and 100,000 roubles. Offenders fined twice in the same year will face criminal penalties including a prison sentence of two to six years. Something as innocuous as participating in a panel discussion with a blacklisted organisation could be punished under the legislation, Lokshina said. (The fines are actually quite small, considering the gravity of these organizations's acts, and surely Washington and/or its NATO vassals can be counted to quickly ante up the funds to pay, if necessary.)

The “undesirable” organisation legislation is the latest in a string of measures cracking down on civil society that followed widespread opposition protests about Putin’s return to the presidency in 2012. He signed a law requiring “political” organisations that received funding from abroad to register as “foreign agents”. At least 60 groups, including leading Russian human rights organisations such as Memorial, were given the demeaning label, which is also often used to refer to spies, and several were forced to shut down. (More tendentiousness; "cracking down on civil society," sounds totalizing and ominous, as if the reporter was talking about Chile's Pinochet, or Suharto's Indonesia instead of modern Russia.)

In 2014, the parliament passed a controversial law limiting foreign ownership of Russian media holdings to 20%. As a result, the Finnish group Sanoma sold its stake this month in the influential business newspaper Vedomosti to a Russian businessman. (This law was also vital to stem foreign influence in national affairs and protect Russia's sovereignty from internal attacks. We all know what role the business media play in any dirty tricks calculated to advance Washington's hegemonic agenda. If anything, it took the Russian legislators quite a long time to wake up to the insidiousness of this new destabilizaing technology invented by Washington, the "weaponization of NGOs". In that sense, it is Washington, again, that has inaugurated a new era of poisoning the tools of civil society. See the above referenced Korybko article.)

The “undesirable” organisation bill “goes further, but it’s part of the same trend, the trend of repressing independent activists, independent civil society, repressing protesters”, Lokshina said.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

[box] Jeff J. Brown, recently named associate editor for this site, is the author of “44 Days Backpacking in China: The Middle Kingdom in the 21st Century, with the United States, Europe and the Fate of the World in Its Looking Glass” (2013), “Reflections in Sinoland – Musings and Anecdotes from the Belly of the New Century Beast” (2015), and “Doctor WriteRead’s Treasure Trove to Great English” (2015). He is currently writing an historical fiction, “Red Letters – The Diaries of Xi Jinping”, due out in 2016. He is a member of The Anthill, a collective of authors who write about China, and also submits articles on Oped News and Firedog Lake. Besides The Greanville Post, his articles have been published by Paul Craig Roberts, The Saker, Ron Unz, Alternative News Network, Russophile, 15 Minute News, The Daily Coin, Hidden Harmonies and many other websites. He has also been a guest on Press TV. In the words of fellow anti-imperialists, Shadow of Truth, "Jeff Brown of 44days.net,  is our “eyes and ears on the ground in Beijing.  Because he lives in a suburb of Beijing with his family,  he can provide us with real news, data and political/economic developments in China – as opposed to the filtered propaganda vomited at us from U.S. media puppets. [/box]