People Would Rather Believe Than Know: Activists Gone Wild

Uncle Volodya says, “The question is whether privileged élites should dominate mass-communication, and should use this power as they tell us they must, namely, to impose necessary illusions, manipulate and deceive the stupid majority, and remove them from the public arena.”

Once upon a time I believed that the premiere, crème de la crème occupation in which you could be a total rolling on the floor, snapping at your own entrails, certifiable kook and still get respect – even acclamation – from the public was psychologist. After all, there are no wrong answers in psychology: the psychologist is not particularly interested in hearing you give the book answer, and is far more interested in what made you choose the response you did give. While that might be a science which reveals volumes about the human condition and baseline mental state, it also permits the practice, within the profession, of the aforementioned kooks who are merely grooming some kookie theory which has no basis in reality. It doesn’t mean all psychologists are kooks, but you could be a kook and fit right in among respected psychologists without causing a ripple.

Anyway, perhaps that was never really true of psychology. That’s just what I believed, but even if it were true, psychology couldn’t hold a candle to another professional pursuit for entertaining fantasy, wallowing in bullshit until you have to squint to see where you’re going, and prevalence of crazy people. And that professional pursuit is…drumroll, please…human-rights activist. And the craziest human-rights activists under the earth’s sun are those who write for the Kyiv Post.

Exhibit A – “Cargo 200 From Ukraine To Russia” Facebook group founder Eleva Vasilieva. According to Ms. Vasilieva, 4,000 Russian soldiers and mercenaries have been killed or are missing so far fighting in Ukraine.

That’s quite a statement, and certainly speaks to the ferocity of the Ukrainian military when you consider that according to the UN, only about 2,593 people have been killed in total – including civilians – between mid-April and 27 August 2014. While Ms. Eleva’s records tell her a thousand Russian soldiers were killed just in the battle for Ilovaisk, in only two days.

I guess nobody has figured out who they are yet, at least not most of them, because her ‘organization’ claims to have tracked and identified only 200 Russians. The rest of the bodies vanished when the Russians rammed through their phony ‘aid convoy’ to Lugansk and then, after loading up thousands of dead Russians – “Cargo 200”, so called from the film of the same name, and the likely source from which Cargo-200ophiles gleaned their breathless reference to “zinc-lined coffins” – they headed back to the Rodina, pausing only once in awhile along the way to steal top-secret Ukrainian military equipment, perhaps hoping it would teach them to make fire. That last comes to us courtesy of Project Maidan (“Serving as an informational bridge between the West and a changing Ukraine”), and they got it from the Ukrainian George Washington, Andriy Lysenko. So called because it is impossible for him to tell a lie.

“Russian authorities have denied any involvement of regular troops in Ukraine, despite numerous photos of killed Russian soldiers“, author Oksana Grytsenko tells us. Well, if you want to know what a Russian soldier looks like, there’s a group of them frozen in guilty tableau in the photo accompanying the article, which is captioned “Slovyansk, April 13, 2014. Ambush of Russian soldiers.” How can you tell they are Russian soldiers? Well, by their….because they have….oh, I know!! Because they are wearing “Koloradki” ribbons!

Please, let us not have any more silliness about they-must-be-Russian-Special-Forces-because-they-are-carrying-AK-100-series-assault-rifles. Anyone can get their hands on a genuine AK-100 series rifle – they are manufactured for export – or a replica which is visually indistinguishable from the real thing.

Hell of a careless ambush, too, if you ask me. In the background a group is standing up gawping around, and the group includes at least one apparent civilian wearing a bright-blue parka. That’s probably Putin; I heard he was a micro-manager.

Vasilieva says she does not know how many Russian troops are still in Ukraine – live ones, she means – but there is absolutely no doubt there were as many as 30,000. Nearly half as many Russian soldiers in Ukraine as there were Ukrainians, since the strength of the Ukrainian army is only about 60,000. Hard to imagine a force that size going unnoticed, isn’t it? Especially when everyone who has an IPhone is a movie producer. Also hard to imagine the Ukrainian army was not crushed to bits, considering the Donetsk and Lugansk “pro-Russian terrorists” would be additional to 30,000 Russian soldiers, and there are supposed to be a couple of thousand of them. Mind you, the Ukrainians have their volunteer “punishment battalions” of goose-stepping Bandernazis, so perhaps that was the deciding factor that resulted in several thousand dead among the Russian army. Those Azov lads must be dead shots over their shoulders with a mirror, like Annie Oakley, since when seen they were often running away: last to arrive, first to depart.

The 30,000 Russian troops is solid, though – no getting around it. Even some military sources told her. Let me guess: “military expert” Dmitry Tymchuk? Let me clue you in on a little secret, Eleva – if a clock’s hands made a single revolution of its face every time Dmitry Tymchuk told a lie, you could use that clock for a fan in your office.

It’s not hard to discern where the mathwagon went off the track, though – Ms. Vasilieva claims the figure for casualties among the Ukrainians is wrong, too, by a factor of about 10, at 8000 killed. So the spawny-eyed dimwits at the UN had better wake the fuck up, because where they believe just under 3000 people have been killed, Eleva knows that number is actually around 12,000. Could prove it, too, if the Russians didn’t keep sneaking in under the cover of aid convoys and hauling off their dead.

I hate to use such a hackneyed western phrase – look for it coming soon again to an MH-17 report near you – but we may never know. Why? Because we live in a world where an international body like the United Nations takes its casualty figures from “activists” like the “Syrian Observatory For Human Rights”, a single crackpot working out of his living room in England, for overall Syrian casualties. Which is a roundabout way of saying the UN has more of a real idea how many angels can dance on the head of a pin than it does how many people have been killed in Ukraine, because Ukraine’s politicians just essentially make up the figures, minimizing those which could be damaging and maximizing their own destruction of the enemy – which is always comprised of Russian soldiers because otherwise somebody might notice they are actually Ukrainians who have done nothing to deserve being killed – until nobody has any idea of the true number.

For the wretched conceit of a liar, in supposing himself clever enough to invent stories so ingenious that they shall, for any time, impose on people for the truth, and the still grosser folly in imagining, as he must do, that the world will, without investigation and analysis, take for granted anything he chooses to assert–that world more shrewd, more cunning, and as prying as himself–what a conceited ass must the liar be! How superior over others in cunning must he not believe himself! What fools must he not suppose the rest of mankind!

Charles William Day, The Maxims, Experiences, and Observations of Agogos

The Kyiv Post carries at its masthead the maxim, “Independence. Community. Trust.” One of those words doesn’t belong there. See if you can guess which one.