A bit of news yesterday reminded me of something old — certainly of an old practice. Here was the news: The Chinese government is sending e-mails to Western officials, purporting to be from Falun Gong representatives. The e-mails are designed to discredit Falun Gong, and opposition to the Chinese dictatorship generally. Beijing should be able to do better, though: The e-mails are laughably transparent — laughable in the transparency of their fraudulence.
Just a little walk down Memory Lane: When Andrei Sakharov won the Nobel peace prize in 1975, the Kremlin was very, very upset. (Same as the Chinese government was upset last year, when Liu Xiaobo won.) They did a lot of things: including forging a telegram of congratulations to Sakharov from Augusto Pinochet!
Nice going, guys — slick. Maybe in 2011 they would have forged an e-mail?
A bit like, perhaps, a certain group of youngsters pretending to be p*mps (would not let me put the "i" in) or Muslim radicals and taping reactions of their political opponents, simply to undermine them...
But no. NPR, Planned Parenthood, and Acorn are evil, so it is OK for them to do it, because they are good.
Machievellian. Seems to me that many conservatives sympathize with Machievelli. Ends justifying means and all that.
Reply to this commentLinkReport AbuseAllan, to put on a ruse for the purpose of observing unvarnished response (which might discredit the object) is not the same thing as to falsely project a ruse for the purpose of discrediting an organization. In the first case, the discrediting revelation come from the mouth of the object; in the second, the source of discredit is the false statement itself. If you cannot see this distinction, you are both morally and rationally deficient.
Reply to this commentLinkReport AbuseJust as reheiler says, the degree of moral and intellectual idiocy needed to conflate O'Keefe with the CCP is nigh incalculable.
Reply to this commentLinkReport AbuseThe tragedy is when the West falls for the subterfuge.
The Kremlin presented a forged ID card that has kept Demjanjuk in court after court for 30 plus years.
Apparently we learned nothing from Duranty's forgery
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