Thread by @akoz33

Yesterday I listened to the second Mark Solonin talk on the Smolensk air crash that killed President Kaczyński in 2010. After that I could not sleep. This, together with the latest revelations about the GRU operations in the Czech Republic (explosions in Vrbetice) & now Slovakia

plus other recent revelations have drastically changed the way I this event. I used to estimate the chance of foul play in Smolensk at less than 5% now I think it’s over 90%. Solonin is responsible for much of this change: his typically careful analysis, using his knowledge of

aviation engineering, physics and mathematics while avoiding politics as much as possible (he gives an impartial and accurate presentation of the political divisions in Poland, trying not to take sides, although, of course, it is clear that his sympathies lie more with the

“not an accident” side because this is the only conclusion compatible with the evidence) he completely destroys the arguments of the original Russia lead MAK investigation as well as those of the Polish “Miller commission”, which largely agreed with MAK. But the other half of

the change was due to something else: the realization that our view of Russia and the “rationality of Putinism” was completely wrong. And it was on these general reasons rather than technical details that my skepticism of the “not an accident’ theory was based. I think this was

also the reason why so many Poles, especially opponents of the PiS government rejected this theory as a conspiracy theory believed only by the ignorant and the fanatical. They call it “The Smolensk Church”. I used to think so to. Exactly why my view has changed I will explain

time. But this time I want to say just one thing. From the beginning it was obvious that the Russians lied, that much of their explanation did not make sense, that there was something extremely unusual and suspicious in the behaviour of the Russian controllers at Smolensk (more

about it another time) and the most damning evidence of all was Russia’s refusal to return the wreckage of the plane.
But all of that could be explained away as follows: the Russians are just being themselves. They lie? Well, they always lie - whether there is any need or not.

The ground controllers behave incompetently? The are Russian controllers - always incompetent.
The equipment malfunctions? It’s Russia. Nothing unusual - no proof in any of that. The PO government was faced with the situation: Russia refuses to hand over the wreckage and their

report is full of holes, the bodies they returned are all mixed up and the whole thing looks like a complete mess. But what should we do? If we accuse Russia of causing the death of half of Poland’s political elite (albeit our opponents) we will have no choice but to break

relations with them. Or they will do with us. Even if there is no formal break - the relations will become very bad and our Western partners will not like it. They will put pressure on us to accept the Russian version - more or less. Don’t be such Russophobes, you can’t believe

they really did it on purpose! And we don’t, so let’s go along and just say that Russians are being Russians and we have to live with that.” This is what, I think happened, and this is what I think they and their supporters are still thinking. But now it is becoming clear that

it was a horribly mistaken way of thinking. But it is too late now to change their view- they are too committed. For people like Anne Applebaum and @radeksikorski Smolensk has become a personal fight with their political and personal enemies (some of them - former friends) in

which there can be no going back - the “Smolensk cult” consists entirely of crazies (like the ones who insist that there is no covid virus or that the vaccines are intended to control us) and if others like Solonin, Illarionov, the British air crash investigator Frank Taylor or

the anonymous blogger or group appearing under the name Flanker 20, who wrote the detailed analysis of the crash, on which Solonin’s one is based - they all must also be “crazy conspiracy theorists” - what other reason could there be?
Actually, there is an uncanny resemblance

between the Smolensk crash and the story of the origins of the Covid-19 pandemic in one of the Wuhan lab. When the whole thing started, the well known Russian virologist Pyotr Chumakov stated that the virus was likely created in a lab in Wuhan where Chinese scientists (with

American help) were carrying out “crazy experiments”, that such a thing could be done and in fact he could do it himself, and that the only way to decide what happen would be by an international inspection of the Wuhan lab, but, as he “prophetically” said at the time, China would

never allow it. Sure enough, almost the entire scientific establishment of the West got behind the view that the virus emerged naturally from an animal - old articles in Nature n which worries were expressed that a lab could become the source of epidemic were modified to say

there was a “scientific consensus” that the virus came from an animal, and all those who claimed otherwise (many famous scientists among them) were vilified as crazy conspiracy theorists. And of course China refused to permit any genuine investigation of the kind that Pyotr

Chumakov called for (while saying that they wouldn’t agree to it). This was, of course, explained as the Chinese behaving in their usual way, which we have to learn to live with. However, with passage of time the “some animal” theory had become increasingly untenable and now

many scientists who originally rejected the lab hypothesis (like Piotr’s brother Konstantin Chumakov) now say that the virus quite likely escaped from a lab (while insisting that it was a “natural” virus and not a chimeric one).

This all has lead me to rethink my ideas about

“conspiracies”, the role of experts etc. I will surely write more about it, but essentially my conclusion is that we are all in a predicament from which it is not easy to scale. The world is full of both conspiracy theories, same crazy but others more plausible, but unfortunately

also of real conspiracies. There are regimes which use conspiratorial tools as a matter of routine but also spread fake conspiracy theories for their own purpose. Like many others I used to think we could rely on experts to help us in such situations since few people have the

necessary technical knowledge, skill and time to deal with this themselves but our experts have proved themselves as human as the rest of us and hence influenced by both self-interest and ideology. So we are actually on our own and have to solve this problem for ourselves.