Sleazy Glitz Delirium
It's tempting to go down the rabbit hole of scandal and stay mired there, but we know enough about the organized crime ring of deviant freaks to know our main focus should be getting them out of power
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There is a reason our next two Bette Dangerous guests have experience documenting trials of war criminals at The Hague. We need to learn how criminal leaders were brought to justice in the past to determine a prosecution strategy for the present.
On Sunday, we will be joined by Croation author Slavenka Druković, whose book They Would Not Hurt a Fly depicts firsthand reporting on the trials of Yugoslavian war criminals.
And look for an upcoming invite to a two-part Tuesday series with Vesna Pusić, a Croatian sociologist and politician who served as First Deputy Prime Minister and Minister of Foreign and European Affairs. Pusić said of her book, Democracies and Dictatorships, which also covered the International Criminal Tribunal for the Former Yugoslavia (ICTY) at The Hague: “I wrote about it thinking it was the past, but it turned out to be the future.”
“The topic of ICTY and ICC (International Criminal Court) is as relevant today as it was then,” she said, “only on a much larger scale. The fact that the people who were absolute masters of (a small) universe and of life and death for more than 100,000 people during the four wars of former Yugoslavia, ended up in the dock of ICTY and ICC and either died in prison or are serving long prison sentences, is such an important message. In addition, the whole topic of political exploration of patriotism and the politics of collective emotions, and how is it that in the process these guys all got rich?! It’s all there, only in small, ‘laboratory’ conditions.”
It is going to be an amazing week for the Bette community, and I wanted to begin this report with the reminder that criminal leaders — men like Slobodan Milošević, who died in prison at The Hague after becoming the first sitting head of state charged with war crimes — can be brought to justice. Milošević was arrested for corruption, abuse of power, and embezzlement in 2001, and then transferred to the ICTY to stand trial for war crimes. He died of a heart attack in prison before the trial concluded. After his death, prosecutors found he was a part of a joint criminal enterprise that used violence such as ethnic cleansing from parts of Croatia, and the International Court of Justice (ICJ) found he had violated the Geneva Convention by failing to prevent genocide.
So if past is prologue, revisiting the ICTY feels very important and very timely.
Our focus needs to be on strategy — too much scandal rubbernecking and this moment will slip away.
I am very grateful for the collective efforts of investigative reporters willing to endure the grotesque world of sick f**ks, spelunking their way through the Epstein releases. I, too, suit up — wearing my punk rock armor — when I probe that world.
But we already knew that Epstein was a convicted pedophile working with the Russians.
We’ve known for years that Trump’s orbit is filled with convicted pedophiles with ties to Russia. Thread after thread, year after year, I and others report this dirty sh*t and yet, Trump and Putin are still in power.
Sleazy Glitz
As Dave Troy wrote last week:
A Russian defector by the name of Viktor Suvorov has suggested that Russia may unleash destabilizing information prior to an escalation. In his words:
“Russia will launch a scandal parade. Dirt will be invented, created or dug up on USA’s leaders & friends abroad. Nations would distrust their leaders.”
So when I see that now, the main news anyone seems to be talking about is the Epstein Scandal Parade — distracting, weaponizing, destabilizing — I have to bring people back around to the focused mission: removing these creeps responsible for so much death and destruction from power.
This is not to say that this very scandal is not an Achilles heel for Trump — it is. But my point is we’ve already proven that Trump — a convicted sex felon mired in corruption, abuse of power, treason, and a committor of crimes against humanity. Do we need another ten million Epstein emails or a higher body count?
I really don’t think so.
I am now watching the Epstein scandal parade try to take down Keir Starmer, and fakes spread about Emmanuel Macron, and this is exactly what Russia does.
As Ukrainian historian Tetiana Boriak taught us, Russia weaponizes everything.
And its zombie armies are weaponizing the Epstein spectacle.
Disrupting Dark Carnivals
So today, I feel a very urgent need to remind you of my reporting on the work of author Peter Pomerantsev, which I spent much of last year bringing to you.
In my report on his book, Nothing Is True and Everything Is Possible: Adventures In Modern Russia, I wrote:
In dazzling TV studios bathed in glam lighting, the propagandists are like a Greek chorus smothered in horseshit and sparkling sequence, always warning viewers how the West is out to get them. The West, a term that is almost meaningless in an era where ‘the West’ was lost to Reality TV fascism.
In Russia, the Kremlin has a kung fu grip on media, who treat reality like a rotting corpse, trotting it out on rare occasions but constantly subverting it with fiction tailored to benefit Vladimir Putin.
It’s in the stunning churning madness of Moscow in the oily aughts that Peter Pomerantsev finds himself in the center of the media maelstrom. His 2015 book, revised in 2017 — Nothing Is True and Everything Is Possible: Adventures In Modern Russia — offers a blueprint for the fascist dystopia that’s now leaching into democratic nations.
Pomerantsev writes:
“With no idea of the future left, facts become unnecessary. They are, after all, unpleasant things, reminders of one’s mortality and limitations… The process occurred in Russia harder and faster because cynicism and disillusionment set in earlier… everything turned into a dark carnival more rapidly. The Russian president turned politics into a reality show, remaking authoritarianism with the logic of twenty-first century entertainment.”
Nothing Is True gives us a ringside seat on how an authoritarian state is created using television, and alternately how the television can and must be smashed into a million tiny pieces.
He doesn’t pull punches on the central thesis of his book: that Russia’s ‘glittering masquerade’ is delivered through media by the ‘battering ram of Kremlin propaganda’ — a ‘society of simulation’ — where politics is performance art and everything is PR. The promise of ‘stability’ was always cover for the intended fascist mafia state run by the bandits from St. Petersburg.
Pomerantsev describes Moscow as a city ‘living in fast forward, changing so fast it breaks all sense of reality’ — everything remade to suit the simulation — buildings, people, political parties — all manufactured.
The primary puppeteer of this simulation is Vladislav Surkov, the political technologist who deconstructed reality so Putin could consolidate all power and Russia ‘can feel like an oligarchy in the morning, a democracy in the afternoon, a monarchy for dinner and a totalitarian state by bedtime.’
“‘Performance’ was the city’s buzzword,” Pomerantsev writes, “a world where gangsters become artists, gold diggers quote Pushkin, Hells Angels hallucinate themselves as saints. Russia had seen so many worlds flick through in such blistering progression—from communism to perestroika to shock therapy to penury to oligarchy to mafia state to mega-rich—that its new heroes were left with the sense that life is just one glittering masquerade, where every role and any position or belief is mutable… It was only years later that I came to see these endless mutations not as freedom but as forms of delirium, in which scare-puppets and nightmare mystics become convinced they’re almost real and march toward what the President’s vizier would go on to call the ‘the fifth world war, the first non-linear war of all against all.’”
‘Sleazy glitz’ offered the perfect distraction from reality, ‘the cash has come so fast, like glitter shaken in a snow globe, that it feels totally unreal.’ Foreign academics come to help democracy along, only to find out there is no interest in democracy, just more simulation, a country in transition to some sort of ‘postmodern dictatorship that uses the language and institutions of democratic capitalism for authoritarian ends.’
A model who spent time on Epstein’s island and in one of Russia’s cults commits suicide. Another model who spent time in the same cult also kills herself. The cults described sound like prototypes for QAnon, the cult that created the J6 foot soldiers and that always had a shirtless Putin and a yoked Trump in the role of hero.
There is something rotten in the heart of Russia, and the TV producers know this, but they delude themselves that it doesn’t matter.
And as truth becomes choked off, voices call out from the grave. Murdered journalists and dead lawyers are not shown on shiny TV, but jailed businessmen and women are — their cages drab with poor lighting as good lighting is reserved for the very tanned propagandists.
By the time the delirium bubble bursts and people are protesting in the streets of Moscow, with the simple but poignant slogan, ‘Don’t Lie, Don’t Steal,’ it’s already too late.
They are stuck with the gangster from St. Petersburg, who oversees a lawless post-truth fiefdom, a ‘whole culture of simulation.’
I ended that report on his book with these words:
Western civilization is ever fragile.
Adventures In the War Against Reality
In my report on the Pomerantsev book, This Is Not Propaganda: Adventures In the War Against Reality, I open with his quote:
“We live in a world of mass persuasion run amok, where the means of manipulation have gone forth and multiplied, a world of dark ads, psy-ops, hacks, bots, soft facts, deep fakes, fake news, ISIS, Putin, trolls, Trump…”—Peter Pomerantsev, This Is Not Propaganda
He makes the point that the Cold War has been replaced by the Information War. And because the deployment of information weapons ‘acts like an invisible radiation’ on its targets — those words lifted directly from a 2011 Russian manual on Information Psychological War Operations — the targets are often oblivious to the poison they are ingesting.
To me, it has become quite clear that the information battle is upstaging the battles taking place on the ground. And even the ground battles are fought in such a way so the perpetrators can maximize their threat value in social media clips. Clickbait fascism.
As I wrote in my This Is Not Propaganda report:
As long as war porn, news porn, and trauma porn are served up in prime time, in what I call ‘Reality TV Fascism’, a coherent and cohesive Resistance is difficult to mount.
As we’ll learn from our guests this week, criminal leaders can be brought to justice — it can happen. But first democracies have to survive the internet.
Sleazy glitz delirium does not have to be a malignant condition, and in fact, these scandal parades serve the interest of fascism.
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More info about Bette Dangerous - This magazine is written by Heidi Siegmund Cuda, an Emmy-award winning investigative reporter/producer, author, and veteran music and nightlife columnist. She is the cohost of RADICALIZED Truth Survives, an investigative show about disinformation and is part of the Byline Media team. Thank you for your support of independent investigative journalism.
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Begin each day with a grateful heart.
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Putin,the lurking predator is destroying many countries. He is always in the background. People seem to get caught up in the illusions. You see it with your own eyes, but they write a whole different story. Money and power are the root to all evil. We may all parish, but Mother Earth will always win.