The Tory Anarchist

The English-language Moscow alternative magazine that’s as much samizdat for the West as it is for Russians is under threat from the authorities. Mark Ames, editor and co-founder (with Matt Taibbi, lately of Rolling Stone) blogs about it here. (And here.)

There’s a campaign afoot to save the eXile, as an online zine if not a print publication, but as I typed this post, the eXile website went down, with Verizon kindly informing me, “Sorry, ‘www.exile.ru’ does not exist or is not available.”

An irony here is that Ames has always been even harder on the servile Western media than on the Russian government. For all their talk about human rights and democracy, the Western media loves nothing more than currying favor in Washington by stoking fear about the Great Russian Bear. And now Kremlin bureaucrats have handed their enemies in the Western press a useful bit of ammunition — though as the Nation notes in its current issue, media here in the Free World have been very slow to notice what’s happening to the eXile, obviously enough because the eXile has been a thorn in the respectable media’s flank.

Long-time eXile contributor Gary Brecher, aka the War Nerd, is also an occasional TAC contributor. I’ll blog about the whole story for TAC tomorrow.

This entry was posted on Tuesday, June 24th, 2008 at 6:27 pm and is filed under Elections, Ideology, Liberty, Websites, magazines. You can subscribe via RSS 2.0 feed to this post's comments. You can comment below, or link to this permanent URL from your own site. Your comments will appear immediately, but I reserve the right to delete innapropriate comments.