Great Scott! Ritter goes to Russia

I confess I find the tones of this man – the former US Marine Intelligence Officer who, in his reincarnation as UN Weapons Inspector, became a household name through his brave and historically vindicated refusal to endorse the warmongering lie that Saddam had weapons of mass destruction – jarring at times. There’s an unseemly laddishness to his talk of Hezbollah “beating the living snot out of” other human beings, even those in IDF uniform.

Plenty of that in the first fifty minutes of this video. For this reason, and because if you did the homework set in yesterday’s post and consulted at least one of the sources given, Scott Ritter affirms but adds little of vital import – though a good deal of fascinating insight served up with a salutary dose of warzone realities – to our grasp of the implications of the strike on Tower 22 which left three Americans dead and has put the world on heightened alert.

That said, Scott’s highly informed logistical assessments of the ongoing genocide are always worth watching. The more so given the need – as I stressed early in my recent post: What of ideology when reality intrudes? – to triangulate sources of information. That need goes up, not down, once we’ve seen that our corporate media are, for reasons set out in the same post, systemically incapable of being truthful on such a matter.

Whatever. At 49:15 (give or take) Scott’s interlocutor, the youthfully impressive Danny Haiphong, asks about his Xmas trip to St Petersburg and then to the Ukraine Front by way of Chechnya.

What follows raises this man considerably in my esteem. Given the years of Western trashing of all things Russian – its culture, its athletes; shit, even its cats – Scott’s unmistakeably sincere enthrallment, and that of his daughter, at a Xmas Day (Orthodox Calendar) performance of the Nutcracker at the Marinsky (where, you may recall, Gilbert Doctorow reported 13 months ago on one of Carmen) is a breath of fresh air.

But what really stand out are his colourful anecdotes from Grozny, the Chechen capital, and the miracle of reconciliation which took place after two bitter wars fomented and incendiarised by Washington’s use – again – of Wahhabism weaponised. Could that reconciliation, he muses, be a model for the reconstruction of Ukraine?

Enjoy this offering from a man who, having long provided a vital factual counterweight to the industrial strength demonising of the Russian Federation on Putin’s watch, now brings a cultural and, dare I say it, spiritual counterweight too.

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