In today's #vatniksoup, I'll introduce an American journalist and former policy adviser, James Carden. He's best-known for his collaboration with Stephen Cohen and Katrina vanden Heuvel, and for his pro-Kremlin takes on the war in Ukraine.
1/24
Carden was a close associate of Stephen Cohen, an American scholar known for his strong support of Russia and Vladimir Putin. Carden was often defending any criticism Cohen's pro-Putin writings received, calling them "scurrilous" and "hysterical".
2/24
In 2017, Carden questioned the involvement of the al-Assad regime in the Khan Shaykhun chemical attack. In his article, he relied on a report by Theodore Postol, who worked together with Maram "Syrian Girl" Susli to debunk al-Assad's involvement in chemical attacks in...
3/24
...Ghouta, Douma and Khan Shaykhun. OPCW investigations concluded that a large majority of the attacks were in fact carried out by the al-Assad regime. Along with Carden, the Russians denied the allegations, calling the reports "one-sided" and "distorted".
4/24
In 2017, Carden appeared on RT as a commentator and suggested that Washington Post has started a "project of promoting a new Cold War with the Russian Federation". The concept of "new Cold War" is something that's been heavily pushed by pro-Kremlin intellectuals like...
5/24
Stephen Cohen and Katrina vanden Heuvel, and it basically stems down to the narrative that the US "neocons" are "sabotaging" the relations to Russia, which apparently should be treated with silk gloves, even though they've completely ditched democracy for...
6/24
...totalitarianism and at the same time plan to invade most of their neighbors. When @cjcmichel called him out on his BS, Carden took the high road and called him a "sniveling shit" in LinkedIn DM's. He also demanded to see if Casey was "brave as BATMAN [sic]".
7/24
Carden's version of 2014 Revolution of Dignity is pretty much the same as the Kremlin's. By his words, "the Ukrainian far right escalated the violence in the Maidan and drove then-President Yanukovych into exile," oversimplifying absolutely everything about the event.
8/24
He has also blamed pretty much everyone else but Putin for the conflict in Ukraine. He's written that former Ukrainian President Petro Poroshenko "ratcheted up the violence" against the "breakaway provinces" of Luhansk and Donetsk. None of his writings mention any Russian...
9/24
involvement among the "separatists", and James put a strong emphasis on Poroshenko's cabinet members with "far-right affiliations". He even went as far as blaming Obama for this, asking the question "What if Mr. Obama had not announced a new round of sanctions against...
10/24
Russia on July 16?" Now, it's worth mentioning that these sanctions were imposed after Russia annexed Crimea, but according to him they "blocked" the "off-ramp" for Putin. By his hypothesis,even the MH17 down shooting could've been avoided if Obama hadn't sanctioned Russia.
11/24
This maneuver would get pretty high score at the Mental Gymnastics World Championships.
In Jun 2022, Carden interviewed Irish MEP Clare Daly on Ukraine. It's a solid pro-Kremlin propaganda piece where both of them agree with each other and enforce each others points of...
12/24
...views. James describes Daly is a "courageous and outspoken" and a "stalwart opponent of the trans-Atlantic militarist consensus".
In Feb 2023, he published an article on The American Conservative, where he blames Ukraine being a "binational kleptocracy".
13/24
This of course was a legacy of the extreme corruption of the Soviet times, which the Ukrainians came to protest in both 2004 and in 2014. Yet, probably due to his pro-Kremlin stance, Carden completely fails to see why the Revolution of Dignity actually happened: ...
14/24
...it was not the "US neocons orchetrating a coup", but the Ukrainian people who were tired of this corruption of both Yanukovych and his party, and the Russian and Ukrainian oligarchs. After the war ends, it will be Ukraine's next big battle.
15/24
By Carden's view Victoria Nuland "helped orchestrate" the "overthrow" of Yanukovych, and this directly led to the 13 000 deaths in the East of Ukraine. By Carden's words, she went "so far as to hand out cookies to anti-government protesters".
16/24
Now that Stephen Cohen has passed away and Katrina vanden Heuvel has been ousted from her position at The Nation, Carden's lost his biggest megaphone. He's now looking for new outlets to publish on, and his latest hit piece...
17/24
on the famous Eurasia Review attacked Jeffrey Goldberg and Anne Applebaum of the Atlantic. His op-ed title "I Saved You Trouble Of Reading Latest Ukraine Propaganda By Two Of America’s Biggest Neocons" already tells you what the article is about, but here are some of the...
18/24
highlights: Carden criticizes Zelensky for closing down three TV channels heavily affiliated with Viktor Medvedchuk. Putin and Medvedchuk are close allies, and Putin is godfather to Viktor's daughter. After Medvedchuk was captured, Putin traded him for the Azovstal...
19/24
..defenders of the Azov Brigade. In the same article, Carden still exaggerates the influence of far-right elements in Ukraine, not-so-subtly blaming them, along with the US and Poroshenko, for the 2014 events in Donbas.He also demonstrates his lack of critical thinking by..
20/24
...claiming that the ratio for Ukraine-Russia casualties is 7:1. This information can only come from two false sources: the doctored leaks from Donbass Devushka, or from serial liar, Douglas Macgregor, who has been dead wrong since the war started.
21/24
James also likes to take all the agency away from Ukraine, suggesting that it's the US and the "neocons" who's forcing "terrified teenagers and young men" to fight in muddy trenches in "conditions along the Somme", again stripping Ukraine of its agency and free will.
22/24
In his latest article "What the 68-year-old Austria treaty could tell us about Ukraine today" from 15 May 2023, he defends Austria's "neutrality", naturally forgetting to mention that Austria is riddled with Russian spies and dirty money:
In addition to contributing to the Kremlin-funded Russia Direct, Carden used to be an editor of The National Interest, an American international relations magazine, but was booted for being, as one of their editors told, "too pro-Putin, even for us."
..."frightened and defenseless" and "at the mercy of alien force." But remember, USA bad.
When it comes to Ukraine, Chomsky has stripped the country from all kinds of agency and sovereignty. He's said that "Ukraine is not a free actor; they’re dependent on what the US...
8/25
...determines," and that the US is only using Ukraine to weaken Russia. In an interview with Jeremy Scahill, Chomsky claimed that "Crimea is off the table. We may not like it. Crimeans apparently do like it," suggesting that the Crimeans want to be part of Russia.
9/25
The annexation was a direct violation of the Budapest memorandum & violated the international law. "Crimeans" are hardly a cohesive group of people & the referendum in 2014 was declared invalid by the UN. The majority of Crimean population supported joining Ukraine in 1991.
10/25
In today's #vatniksoup, I'll introduce an American author and academic, Noam Chomsky. He's best-known for his long history as a political commentator and left-wing activist, and for his staunch criticism of the US foreign policy since the 1960s.
1/25
Chomsky's antiwar activism started around 1962, when he was protesting against the US involvement in the Vietnam War. He started writing essays and eventually books, targeted mostly to the American "New Left" movement. His criticism towards US interventionism continued...
2/25
...during the 70s and the 80s, resisting US involvement in conflicts like Nicaraguan Contra War and the Israeli-Palestine conflict. Since then, everything he does or says is shrouded with rabid anti-Americanism. He seems to consider the US as the "root of all evil", ...
In today's #vatniksoup, I'll introduce a US non-profit organization CODEPINK (@codepink), and its founders Jodie Evans (@MsJodieEvans) and Medea Benjamin (@medeabenjamin). It's best-known for its anti-US stance & for its support of totalitarian regimes around the world.
1/23
In 2006, Benjamin said in an interview with Tucker Carlson that Hugo Chávez, the President of Venezuela, hadn't eroded freedom of speech and civil rights in the country, calling it a "myth". Carlson blamed Medea for "the squelching of minority views", to which Medea...
2/23
..replied: "They [a local TV network] falsified information. They got people out on the street." Later, Chávez's regime seized control of the Supreme Court and undercut the ability of journalists,human rights defenders & other Venezuelans to exercise their fundamental rights.3/23
"the US empire is the root of all evil around the world". This rabid anti-US stance is the basis of all her writings & not-so-surprisingly her anti-imperialistic stance does not include Russia or China: in a Star Wars-y way there is only one evil empire, and that is the US.
9/24
In her bio, she says that she's "geared toward awakening human consciousness" and that she writes about "the end of illusions". She claims that on the collective level we are "driven by propaganda", and on individual level by our ego. I mean, the whole thing reads like it..
10/24
...was written by a high-schooler who just took their first class of Philosophy and smoked some weed.
The interesting thing here is that while she was mostly tweeting about miracles, leftist politics and astrology, nobody gave a shit. Zero likes, zero retweets.
In today's #vatniksoup, I'll be introducing an Australian "citizen journalist", astrologer and conspiracy theorist, Caitlin Johnstone (@caitoz).
She's best-known for promoting outlandish conspiracy theories, and for blaming the US and the West for absolutely everything.
1/24
First, let's take a closer look where Caitlin is coming from - between 2009 and 2011, she was mostly tweeting about spiritual teachers and gurus like Eckhart Tolle and Osho. In 2008 she published a book on astrology.
2/24
Her first somewhat political tweets were about Bernie Sanders, whom she called "impressive" in the debates. After Hillary won the nomination, Caitlin started promoting all kinds of weird conspiracy theories, including the one where Sanders' family was held as a hostage and..
3/24
In today's #vatniksoup, I'll introduce an American conspiracy theorist, lawyer and politician, Robert Kennedy Jr. (@RobertKennedyJr). He's best-known for being the nephew of JFK, and for constantly promoting conspiratorial and false information.
1/25
Robert comes from the prestigious Kennedy family, and his father was the senator and attorney general Robert F. Kennedy. He was just 9-years-old when his uncle, JFK, was assassinated. Five years later, his father was also murdered.
2/25
During the early 80s, Robert had to resign as the Assistant District Attorney for Manhattan after failing his bar exam. A year later he was charged with heroin possession, and went into rehab. He soon became active in the environmental justice, and started lobbying and...