By Screening ‘The Magnitsky Act,’ the Newseum Stood Up for the First Amendment

[newthinking]

Excellent read by "The Nation" (The Nation is one of our older Progressive news sources)

 Russian filmmaker Andrey Nekrasov, a longtime Critic of Putin, embarks to create a film in support of Bill Browder's story about  Sergei Magnitsky. In the process he loses faith in the story as he learns that the facts are not as reported. The story then became about a pursuit of the truth.

Film outlets in Europe have been under heavy pressure not to play it and it is essentially banned there.

https://www.thenation.com/article/by-screening-the-magnitsky-act-the-newseum-stood-up-for-the-first-amendment/


In November 2009 a Russian accountant, Sergei Magnitsky, then in the employ of a Russia-based British hedge-fund manager, William Browder, died in a Russian prison under what are widely believed to be suspicious circumstances. In Browder’s telling, Magnitsky died at the hands of Russian investigative authorities after he had uncovered their theft of $230 million in tax payments from Browder’s investment fund. Browder, an American by birth who renounced his citizenship in 1998, subsequently launched a highly publicized campaign ostensibly meant to shine a light on Magnitsky’s whistle-blowing heroics, decry the corruption of the Russian government, and in the process strike a blow against Russian President Vladimir Putin.

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 And now a controversial new film, The Magnitsky Act—Behind the Scenes, by Russian filmmaker Andrey Nekrasov, is questioning Browder’s version of events and in the process raising troubling questions about the ability of a wealthy hedge-fund manager to get Congress to do his bidding. In a very real sense, what Browder accomplished with the Magnitsky Act is the privatization of US foreign policy.

At a screening of the film at the Newseum in Washington on Tuesday night, the legendary journalist Seymour Hersh said that he believes the film “goes a long way toward deconstructing a myth.” Browder’s legions of neocon cheerleaders—some of whom were present at the screening—have tried to paint Nekrasov as a pawn of Russian intelligence, or, in the words of one attendee, “a foot soldier of the propaganda war.”

Yet, given the filmmaker’s history of taking on Putin in films about the death of Alexander Litvinenko and the wars in Georgia and Chechnya, such accusations are hard to take seriously. According to Nekrasov, “I am a critic of the Russian authorities” but in his opinion, “the West made a mistake by adopting the Magnitsky Act…as they are based on a made-up story.”

[newthinking]

1. Another story from the angle of how truth was abused in favor of a narrative

that was of use.

WPost’s ‘Agit-Prop’ for the New Cold War



Magnitsky’s 2009 death in a Russian jail became a Western cause célèbre with the accountant for hedge-fund executive William Browder hailed as a martyr in the cause of whistleblowing against a profoundly corrupt Russian government. After Magnitsky’s death from a heart attack, Browder claimed his “lawyer” had been tortured and murdered to cover up official complicity in a $230 million tax-fraud scheme involving companies ostensibly under Browder’s control.

Because of Browder’s wealth and political influence, he succeeded in getting the European Parliament and the U.S. Congress to buy into his narrative and move to punish the presumed villains in the tax fraud and in Magnitsky’s death. The U.S.-enacted Magnitsky Act in 2012 was an opening salvo in what has become a new Cold War between Washington and Moscow.

The Magnitsky narrative has now become so engrained in Western geopolitical mythology that the storyline apparently can no longer be questioned or challenged, which brings us to the current controversy about a new documentary that turns the case upside-down and again reveals the superficiality, bias and hypocrisy of the West’s politicians and news media.

https://consortiumnews.com/2016/06/21/wposts-agit-prop-for-the-new-cold-war/