Civilized Debate and Propping Putinism
Last June, over at The Intersection Project, I detailed the myriad Kremlin-sympathetic voices coursing American media, detailing the fallacies shared by Glenn Greenwald’s The Intercept on Ukrainian fascism and the conspiracies shuttled within RT’s English-language programming. In the piece, I also touched upon the analysis pushed by The Nation, the venerable, 151-year-old institution, devoting a paragraph to analyses from contributing editor Stephen Cohen and contributing writer James Carden.
At the time, I’d never interacted with Cohen or Carden; their material, published online, stood widely available. For the first few months following the piece’s publication, neither Cohen nor Carden offered any response. The write-up hung, aged. Months wound, without interaction. Cohen and Carden continued their coverage, and their work with the American Committee for East-West Accord (ACEWA), their non-profit organization that claims to “encourage […] open, civilized, informed debate of all the related issues, current and past, among Americans with different, even opposing, positions, perspectives, and proposals.” Cohen remains one of ACEWA’s most prominent board members, while Carden stands as the executive editor for ACEWA’s EastWestAccord.com.
And then, at the start of this year, I received an unprompted message from Carden. The original spelling has been retained:
Hey asshole. I saw you were looking at my [LinkedIn] profile, you sniveling shit. Here’s an idea: next time you call me a Kremlin stooge, and say i don’t know what I’m talking about — say it to my face and see if you’re as brave as BATMAN. You’re about as pathetic as [Daily Beast reporter Jamie] Kirchick and the rest of them. Fuck you.
When later contacted by phone, Carden — who said he was not speaking “on behalf of the committee” — apologized for the contents of the message. “My own stupidity is my own fault,” he said. In an email, Carden further delineated his position: The message was “sent rashly, stupidly and in anger to a writer … who I saw was viewing my profile and who has smeared me as a Kremlin apologist in the past. The communication, of course, was completely unacceptable and I certainly apologize for sending it.”
While the apology remains appreciated, the message adds to the litany of questions surrounding ACEWA’s professed desires for “civilized” debate. Over the past nine months, Carden has slammed the “neo-McCarthyism” within those who’d seek to hold a firm line against the Kremlin in Ukraine, and labeled a series of Columbia graduate students who’d monitored the Kremlin-funded RT, including myself, as a grip of “lesser lights.” Likewise, ACEWA’s site, which Carden runs, continues to plug news from conspiracy outlets like Consortium News, which, as The Daily Beast’s Cathy Young wrote, “flogs ‘false flag’ conspiracy theories about the shoot down of flight MH-17.”
Carden’s message also does little to quell concerns about ACEWA’s putative objectivity in pursuing its stated goals. Since ACEWA’s inception last year, the group has dealt with continued accusations of pushing Kremlin-sympathetic policy recommendations. As New York University Professor Mark Galeotti told Young last fall, the ACEWA is “depressingly unbalanced in their assumption of moral and geopolitical parity between the U.S. and Russia, as well as their unwillingness to describe what is happening in Ukraine as an act of aggression engineered by Moscow.”
But the group’s policy recommendations aren’t the lone track of criticism facing ACEWA. The group’s board members include luminaries such as Gilbert Doctorow, who, as Young noted, “praises Russian journalism for ‘emerging from pro-Western wishful thinking,’” and Cohen, whom The New Republic has labeled as Putin’s “toady” and Slate has termed Putin’s “apologist.”
When contacted, Cohen expressed frustration at the pro-Kremlin epithets — apparently missing the irony of his response. “I do not like the slurring personal attacks on me, but I try not make things personal,” Cohen told me via email. “…The attacks are not ‘fair’ to our country, which desperately needs a civil public discourse about Russia and US policy. Just shouting ‘Putin Apologist,’ and worse, thwarts that discourse. As I’ve insisted, I am a patriot of US national security, but none of these defamation peddlers discuss the national security issues involved — not even since Paris! They are being unfair to our country.”
Nonetheless, Cohen admitted to Young in October that his positions — which include claims that Putin “virtually saved [US President Barack] Obama’s presidency” and attempts to legitimize the “referendums” in eastern Ukraine — don’t offer any scholastic analysis, but instead pursue a “conscious strategy” of combating an alleged narrative within broader American media. “In my view, the mainstream media have often disregarded many canons of journalism in covering Russia under Putin, etc., including balance, selection, fact checking, mixing news reporting with editorializing,” Cohen told me. “The mainstream establishment has recklessly abetted a new, and more dangerous Cold War.”
Carden, however, has shown little concern about participating with Kremlin-sponsored outlets that “disregard many canons of journalism in covering Russia[.]” Since beginning his work with ACEWA, Carden has appeared multiple times on RT, including one appearance in which he compared material on RT and the Kremlin-funded “Sputnik” outlet to “incessant coverage out of the Washington Post and the New York Times … that continues to religious hew to the neoconservative line[.]” Carden’s most recent appearance on RT came but a few weeks ago, in which he described both Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty and NATO as “frankly a waste of taxpayer money.” (Carden didn’t say anything about the multiple RFE/RL journalists still imprisoned through the post-Soviet sphere.)
Likewise, since his appointment as ACEWA’s executive editor, Carden has continued contributing to the Kremlin-backed Russia Direct outlet. In a separate piece, Russia Direct noted that ACEWA could be a “glimmer of hope” for relations between Moscow and Washington, and described Carden as one of ACEWA’s “founders.” Prior to his appointment with ACEWA, Carden took to Russia Direct to detail “the Obama administration’s State Department and the European Union’s eager expansionists” who “assisted in the overthrow” of Viktor Yanukovych’s government in Ukraine. In another piece for Russia Direct, Carden claimed that the “years 2008–2013” — that is, the height of the Obama administration’s “reset” policy — “might, without exaggeration, be seen some years down the line as the West’s ‘March on Moscow.’”
According to the Kremlin-backed outlet, Carden has “contributed articles … [to] the New York Times[.]” Carden, however, notes that this information is incorrect, and that his writing came within a Times supplement for Russia Beyond the Headlines — another Kremlin-backed outlet. “I had asked them to fix but [they] never did,” Carden told me. “I certainly would never ever claim to have written for the Times. That’s their mistake, I don’t know what to do about it.”
Carden has, however, continued writing for The Nation — including a June article in which he described ACEWA’s launch as an “important step in the nascent movement against what many are now calling a new Cold War.” In the piece, Carden mentions Cohen and the “highly respected” William vanden Heuvel. However, the piece does not disclose that both Cohen and vanden Heuvel are closely related to The Nation’s editor and publisher, Katrina vanden Heuvel. (Cohen is married to vanden Heuvel, while William is Katrina’s father.)
When asked why the piece contained no disclosure, Carden responded, “I can’t imagine that that is a secret.” Katrina vanden Heuvel — who erroneously described Georgia and Ukraine as “former Russian republics” earlier this week, further calling into doubt The Nation’s grasp of post-Soviet affairs — also defended the decision not to disclose relations, noting, “The James Carden article you mention was mostly a friendly announcement of the newly formed institution: ACEWA.”
Cohen, meanwhile, did not offer any direct thoughts on Carden’s initial, epithet-laced message to me. When asked whether Carden’s comments reflected ACEWA’s stated goals, Cohen responded, “This is a baited-hook question. If you know anything about me — another fully researchable subject — you know my answer.”
An exhaustive search of Cohen’s prior writings, however, turned up nothing regarding his views on demanding to know if reporters are as “brave as BATMAN.” And unfortunately, given both his and Carden’s prior and continued writings, ACEWA’s reputation as a font for Kremlin-friendly policy and posturing only continues to ossify, no matter how many epithets may come of it.
