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A significant tool of sociological analysis is to ask the question, “Sez who?” It is an intentional misspelling of “Says who?”
When you know who they are, you will get a clearer perspective of what and why they say certain things.
Accordingly, the background of Ron Ridenour, CounterPunch and Andrei Martyanoc has been provided.
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Ron Ridenour is an American journalist and author living in Denmark. Describing himself as a “journalist-author-editor-activist for peace, equality and justice….I have written for the mass media until blacklisted, for the underground and for social media.”[1]
After starting to “question American values” during military service, he became politically active in the early 1960s, inspired by the Cuban Revolution. At first protesting against the Bay of Pigs invasion, he joined the Fair Play for Cuba Committee. He was an activist during the 1964 Mississippi Freedom Summer campaign to force the state to allow black people the right to vote. He later supported the Black Panther Party, and other liberation movements inside the United States as well as revolutionary movements throughout Latin America. He was with the American Indian Movement at Wounded Knee occupation (1972), where he wrote about their resistance for the Los Angeles Free Press.
Ridenour began working as a reporter in 1967. He was fired from three dailies (Hanford Sentinel, Riverside Press-Enterprise, Hollywood Reporter) for failing to self-censor his reportages and for union organizing efforts, as well as support for the Black Panthers. The FBI visited at least two work places to get him fired. In the 1970s, he reported for and edited several alternative “underground” weeklies, including the “Los Angeles News Advocate“, “Los Angeles Free Press” and the “L.A. Vanguard”.
Ridenour tells “Soon after the end of the war against Southeast Asia, I obtained 1,000 censored pages of dossiers various National Security Council agencies had on me. FBI, CIA, Los Angeles Police Department‘s red squad all tailed and harassed me, even to the point of forging tax return papers in an attempt to convince the left and anti-war movements that I was a military spy.”[2]
In 1980, he moved to Denmark for personal reasons. Between 1982 and 1996, he lived for a year in Nicaragua and worked for the Nicaraguan Sandinista government; and eight years in Cuba where he translated, wrote and edited for its foreign publishing house, Editorial José Martí, and its news agency, Prensa Latina.
His work has appeard in many publications, including The Morning Star, New Statesman, The Guardian, Playboy, Liberation News Service, Pacific News Service, Coast, Qui, Skeptic, Sevendays, and Pacifica Radio.
He presently writes for Covert Action Magazine.
He has written many books, the latest is “The Russian Peace Threat: Pentagon on Alert”, Punto Press, New York, June 2018.
https://wikispooks.com/wiki/Ron_Ridenour
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CounterPunch is an online magazine. Content includes a free section published five days a week as well as a subscriber-only area called CounterPunch+, where original articles are published weekly.[1] CounterPunch is based in the United States and covers politics in a manner its editors describe as “muckraking with a radical attitude”.[2] It has been described as left-wing.[3][4]
CounterPunch began as a newsletter, established in 1994 by the Washington, D.C.-based investigative reporter Ken Silverstein.[5] He was soon joined by Alexander Cockburn and then Jeffrey St. Clair, who became the publication’s editors in 1996 when Silverstein left.[6][7] In 2007, Cockburn and St. Clair wrote that in founding CounterPunch they had “wanted it to be the best muckraking newsletter in the country”, and cited as inspiration such pamphleteers as Edward Abbey, Peter Maurin, and Ammon Hennacy, as well as the socialist/populist newspaper Appeal to Reason (1895–1922).[8] When Alexander Cockburn died in 2012 at the age of 71, environmental journalist Joshua Frank became managing editor and Jeffrey St. Clair became editor-in-chief of CounterPunch.[9][10]
During the 2016 presidential election, CounterPunch published a piece attributed to Alice Donovan,[11] who purported to be a freelance writer but US intelligence officials alleged to be a pseudonymous employee of the Russian government.[12] Donovan was tracked by the FBI for nine months, as a suspected fictitious persona created by the GRU.[12][13] In late November 2017, after CounterPunch had published several more pieces by Donovan, The Washington Post contacted Jeffrey St. Clair about her. The co-editor said that Donovan’s pitches did not stand out amongst the pitches that CounterPunch received daily[12] and began making inquiries. He asked Donovan to substantiate her identity by sending a photo of her driving license but she did not.[12] On the same day The Washington Post article was published on Donovan, St. Clair and Frank published a piece stating that CounterPunch only ran one article by Alice Donovan during the 2016 election, which was on cyber-breaches of medical databases. Donovan was also exposed by the newsletter as a serial plagiarizer.[11] CounterPunch removed all of the articles from their site.[14] In a January 2018 follow-up article, St. Clair and Frank exposed a network of alleged trolls that operated a site called Inside Syria Media Center, promoting a pro-Bashar al-Assad and pro-Russian view of the Syrian Civil War. St. Clair and Frank speculated that the website was connected to the same network of trolls as Alice Donovan, which was later confirmed by the Atlantic Council and other researchers.[15][13][14]
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/CounterPunch
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ANDREI MARTYANOV is an expert on Russian military and naval issues. He was born in Baku, USSR in 1963. He graduated from the Kirov Naval Red Banner Academy and served as an officer on the ships and staff position of Soviet Coast Guard through 1990. He took part in the events in the Caucasus which led to the collapse of the Soviet Union. In mid-1990s he moved to the United States where he currently works as Laboratory Director in a commercial aerospace group. He is a frequent blogger on the US Naval Institute Blog. He is author of Losing Military Supremacy, The (Real) Revolution in Military Affairs, and Disintegration: Indicators of the Coming American Collapse.
https://www.claritypress.com/book-author/andrei-martyanov/
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COUNTERPUNCH
April 4, 2019
Has the US Lost Its Military Supremacy Over Russia?
by Ron Ridenour
When I first heard of Andrei Martyanov, I was skeptical about his intentions. Born in Baku, Azerbaijan, USSR, 1963, he became a naval officer and expert on Russian military and naval issues. He took part in conflicts in the Caucasus. In mid-1990s, he moved to the US for reasons unstated in print. He currently works as laboratory director of a commercial aerospace group, and blogs on the US Naval Institute Blog and one on the other side of the fence, unz.com.
This is not a typical leftist or peace activist, but after reading his book and a piece on the website of the world’s most aggressive naval institution, I surmise that this Russian-American seeks to influence the avaricious eagle into realizing that warring against the cautious bear would not achieve success for anyone. Here is his conclusion of that blog piece:
“Today, the Russian Navy is on its way to becoming a leaner and more potent…version of its former Soviet self, capable of carrying out any task in defense of its country. By doing so, the Russian Navy has finally found its mission. Considering Russia’s immense and tragic experience with warfare, such an accomplishment is no small feat. Especially in the absence of a coherent navy specific doctrine.”
This statement is in keeping with what Martyanov sees as his book’s key mission, to assist his native country in defending its national sovereignty, which entails acting to prevent a nuclear world war. As he states in the conclusion of his book, “Losing Military Supremacy”, he is most worried that it is the United States that will pull the triggers to set off World War III.
“The main task today is to prevent by all means any possibility of this delusional, self-proclaimed exceptional nation unleashing Armageddon because of frustration with its own weakness…” so well exposed by now.
Read the rest:
https://www.counterpunch.org/2019/04/04/has-the-us-lost-its-military-supremacy-over-russia/
https://www.counterpunch.org/2019/04/04/has-the-us-lost-its-military-supremacy-over-russia/
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weehingthong 