EDITORIAL: Sean Guillory, Damnable Liar

EDITORIAL

Sean Guillory, Damnable Liar

Yeah, you're better without the mouth, Mr. Guillory. Much better.

Sean Guillory, an avowed Marxist and atheist, has been blogging about Russia since October 2004.  In the six and a half years since then, according to the counter on his blog, he has received just under 310,000 visits — that’s less than 50,000 per year, less than 140 per day.

By contrast La Russophobe, which has only been blogging for five years, has received nearly 2.8 million visits — that’s almost 560,000 per year, more than 1,500 per day.  In other words, we have over ten times more traffic than Sean.

The reason for that is pretty simple. Sean tells lies about Russia, and sensible people aren’t interested in lies.

On February 18, 2011, in a comment responding to a comment from Jeremy Putley, Sean wrote:

I’ll just say this much. First, it doesn’t surprise me that someone who works for an investment company to be a partisan for Khorodkovsky. When it comes to generating fictitious capital, MBK is one of the gods in the investment pantheon.

Sean’s post was about attempting to minimize the significance of revelations by Natalia Vasileva, the aide to Viktor Danilkin (the judge who recently sentenced Mikhail Khodorkovsky to more years in a Russian prison in Siberia), that Khodorkovsky’s trial was rigged by the Kremlin.  In all honesty, to us the post and Sean’s comments upon it read like Sean was high on drugs when he wrote them.

For instance, perusing the quotation above, do you notice how Sean didn’t pause for a second to wonder whether someone like himself, who is an avowed Marxist, might not be too credible on the question of whether a capitalist like Khodorkovsky had been falsely imprisoned? To wonder whether he might look like ridiculous baboon impugning anyone else’s objectivity on that question? It’s quite breathtaking, isn’t it?  But that’s what you get if you’re a SRB reader.  Lies and deception, self-delusion and nonsense.  It’s why folks tend to stay away.

On February 20, 2011, in another comment responding to a comment on the same post, Guillory stated:

On Khodorkovsky’s theft and possible involvement in murder. It’s funny. Before MBK was crushed by Putin, the Western press had no illusions about his antics. In 1997, the NY Times accused MBK of looting funds from the Bank of New York. From reading David Hoffman’s account of how MBK wrestled control of Yukos through setting up shell companies and offshore accounts it seems clear that he was a swindler. But now that MBK is a victim of Putin, that past has been whitewashed, and now no Western paper would dare besmirch his good name. The thing I don’t understand about the whole MBK thing is why he’s the alpha and omega. Why does he get so much attention? Yeah, sure he was targeted by Putin and remains so. I get that. But why has MBK been turned into some kind of saintly martyr? Why does he, of all people, generate so much passion? And yes one can be outraged at both the conduct of the trial against MBK and how he got his money. I just wish that that outrage at the system revolved around a more sympathetic figure, or at least one I think got his comeuppance.

It wasn’t 1997 when the Times published reports about Khodorkovsky, it was 1999.  The Times didn’t write about Khodorkovsky at all in 1997.  Did you know that Sean was a professor of history?  Odd he could be wrong about a thing like that, isn’t it? Especially since it’s not hard to check such facts, just go to the Times Topic for Khodorkovsky and click the “oldest first” button to display its articles in that date order.

And in April 1999, when the Times did first write about Mr. K,  it clearly pointed out that Khodorkovsky was no different than Jay Gould, who was never arrested by the U.S. government of course.  Nor, of course, was Mr. K ever charged with any crime by any Western prosecutor at any time.  But Sean didn’t care to mention any of that. Maybe he has a mental block where people like Jay Gould and Mikhail Khodorkovsky are concerned. Oh, wait a minute, that’s right. He does.

What’s more, in January 2003, many months before Khodorkovsky was arrested by the Kremlin as he tried to begin a presidential bid, the Times prominently reported how Khodorkovsky was leading the charge to implement Western-style honesty and transparency in Russian corporate life.  So actually, it’s perfectly clear why the West was appalled by his clearly political arrest and his neo-Soviet show trial.  And the only reason Sean doesn’t “understand” that is because his mind is too clouded with his own noxious, unprofessional, disgraceful lies.

So Russian “history” according to Sean Guillory is a very surreal place indeed.  And that’s just Sean’s comments on his own post.  Dare you imagine what the actual contents of that post might be like?

Start with the headline.  in his February 20th comment, Sean states:  “I’m not doubting Vasileva’s sincerity. I don’t think she’s lying, nor do I actually doubt her claims.”  Rather odd, then, that the headline of the post should be “Vasileva Bombshell: Big Claims, Little Evidence,” isn’t it?  One could almost think Sean was about five years old, regurgitating such sophomoric inconsistency.

Then move on to the premise:  Khodorkovsky is dirty, and Western approval of him is crazy.  But if that’s true, why in the world would the Kremlin need to rig Khodorkovsky’s trial? As is his wont, Sean doesn’t care to say. He doesn’t need to, you see, because everyone knows that everything Sean says is and must be true.

Another premise of so-called “liberal” Guillory is that there’s no such thing as rehabilitation.  Khodorkovsky was corrupt in the early 1990s, there’s no doubt of it. He could hardly have been otherwise, since every single person in the country was corrupt. Even today, international studies prove conclusively that Russia is one of the most corrupt major civilizations on this planet, top to bottom, side to side. But unlike, say, Vladimir Putin, Khodorkovsky came around. He realized that honesty was the better policy, and he put his money where his mouth was. He was actually turning his oil concern into an open, accountable, reasonable business by the strictest Russian standards when he was arrested by the Kremlin. That means absolutely nothing to Guillory, though. He doesn’t see fit to mention it. Probably Guillory’s hero is Stalin: Any capitalist makes a mistake, you kill them.  It’s the reason countries run by the likes of Guillory and Stalin always collapse into rubble.

Then there is the actual text of Guillory’s post, which reads like it issued from an opium den.  The first time Sean tries to make a factual assertion on his own, it’s pretty bizarre:  “I’m sure this theory is out there somewhere, Vasileva’s revelation, in particular, will pave the way for Medvedev to ‘pardon’ Khodorkovsky by pointing to his favorite pet project: fighting corruption.” He so sure, in fact, that he doesn’t need to check or document his claim in any manner whatsoever. We can take his word. Umm, yeah.

This comes next:  “What has thus far made Vasileva’s whistleblowing fundamentally different from several of those cases above is that they either personally participated in said corruption or provided documents proving it.”  Sean seems to have forgotten that Vasileva was the judge’s aid and assisted him in carrying out his duties. She’s an eyewitness.  She’s testifying about what she saw happen with her own two eyes.  Duh!  One wonders if Sean was high on drugs when he wrote that sentence.

Then Sean asks Vasileva to produce documents to “prove” she’s right. What documents? What documents did Vasileva refer to as being in existence?  None. In fact, Sean quotes her as follows:  “When there is total control, there is no need to read it, you just need to ask what is in it.”  So there were oral discussions, not smoking-gun written documents.  It seems not even Sean Guillory reads the things written on his own blog. The actual judgment itself, Vasileva claims, was written for Danilikin, and that document has already been published by Danilikin himself.  Nobody has claimed the Kremlin sent the document to Danilikin in an e-mail saying “here’s how you’ll rule.”

What’s more, Sean doesn’t care to mention, Danilikin himself has not denied the reports.  For all we know, Vasileva went public with Danilikin’s blessing.

Sean asks how the judge’s own aid could be “absolutely sure” that the sentence was delivered by the Kremlin.  It’s one of the most idiotic questions we’ve ever heard.  She was there, in a position to watch it happen, that’s how. Sean writes about Khodorkovsky that he is “nothing but a crook and deserves what he gets” yet he himself admits there is no judicial process that has come close to proving this.  In other words, Sean has no direct evidence at all of Khodorkovsky’s guilt, yet dares to challenge Vasileva, who was there to see the events happen.

Oh but wait, he doesn’t challenge her.  He admits he believes she’s telling the truth, and that he trashed her to undermine a famous capitalist, who he hates for because of his blind, rabid ideology, in a shameless smear campaign.

Which is why nobody reads Sean Guillory.