A book review of a book review

The book GRAND DECEPTION: The Browder Hoax, by Alex Krainer, has been “banned” – twice banned, no less – on Amazon and it is also “banned” by Barnes and Nobles. It was admittedly published a long time ago, in 2017, but is no less relevant, and still banned, today.

You may find it here.

Bill Browder was and probably still is what we used to call a “speculator” – as I see it: a good-for-nothing, big-time gambler. The “financial set” is a class of people against which I am deeply prejudiced, to say the least, notwithstanding the fact that it includes Alex Krainer himself.

So why care about the “Browder Hoax”. Hoaxes are speculators’ bread and butter, no? What made me read Krainer’s introductory pages was the fact that the financial shark Browder apparently operated in Russia and took part in the big grab of Russian spoils during the decade after the dissolution of the USSR. Russia was brought to its knees, and I was eager to learn about that. So I read on, always prepared to quit after the next paragraph.

Having done with the caveats, I turn to Krainer’s book, which starts with a painstaking analysis of Bill Browder’s self-congratulatory autobiography published in 2015, Red Notice: A True Story of High Finance, Murder, and One Man’s Fight for Justice.

It is so extremely well written, we are told, that it is most likely the product of a ghost writer, It reads like a thriller, but as the title promises, it is a “true” story, and its alleged author, Bill Browder, is a hero, no less. Krainer read it in one gulp, only to find afterwards that it didn’t quite ring true, so he read it again, more carefully.

While my interest in Bill Browder is non-existent and although it doesn’t take much to convince me that a financial shark is a liar and a thief, I reluctantly read all the first 42 chapters demonstrating just that, because Krainer masters the delightful subtleties of polite irony.

So the “hoax”, it appears, is multi-faceted and consists not least of the book itself: Browder’s story is simply not “true”.

What further raised my interest was that Krainer, who was born in communist Croatia and therefore has every reason to distrust Russia, nevertheless questions the virulence of Browder’s denigration of Russia and Gothic epithets referring to Putin. There seems to be a deliberate PR pattern running through Browder’s narrative. The term Russophobia is often explained by geopolitical commentators, as a result of conflicts in the distant past, but I’m not buying: I was brought up to hate Germans, but 80 years after the end of WWII, there is no trace of anti-German sentiment in my country. Krainer demonstrates, with a wealth of examples from the book, how certain stereotypes are repeated again and again with suspicious lack of nuance.

Part 3 of Krainer’s book is a heart-rending account of how Russia was taken apart and turned into a failed state. Browder, of course, blames the Russians for this. But Krainer who is – quite usefully, as it turns out – an expert within the field I so deeply distrust, knows exactly what happened. I don’t understand everything he writes, but he is evidently no man’s fool, cf. a sentence in Amazon’s piece about him:

[I]n 2000. Alex had originated the firm’s research and development program in market analysis and application of neural networks and artificial intelligence in trading of financial and commodities markets.

That was “application of neural networks and artificial intelligence” in 2000! Twenty five years ago! That’s right: no man’s fool.

Krainer more than insinuates that the destruction of Russia by a band of robbers (Russian and Western) was actively supported by US policy. Of course anybody suggesting that the US deliberately engages in despicable acts is labelled a conspiracy theorist, but that doesn’t mean that the “theory” in question is untrue.

Why else would Amazon ban the book, by the way?

What do I care about Bill Browder? Not one hoot, I repeat. But his book, as analysed by Alex Krainer is a remarkable example of how to present Russia in hypnotically monotonous terms, crippling critical thought. Having read it, we must hate and loathe the country and the ogre at its helm to our dying day. Again, we get the sense that Browder’s crusade against Russia – and he is still at it – is very much aided and abetted by USA.

I don’t think we will need many Bill Browder books before we are all convinced that Russia is the end of everything, a modern Niflheimr and its leader an ice-cold, ruthless killer.

Unlike Browder, Krainer explains in Part 4 how that very ogre went on to pick Russia up out of the dust and put Humpty Dumpty together again. Indeed, already in 2017, Russia was doing very well. I won’t quote Krainer’s figures here, because I believe his book merits being read.

As for Browder’s heroic “one-man fight for justice”, that was also a hoax, it turns out – again aided and abetted by USA – concerning Sergei Magnitsky and the 2012 Magnitsky Act. Now Krainer was not the only person who didn’t think the narrative passed the smell test. A Russian film director, Sergei Nekrasov, had made several documentaries that were critical of Russia. His film The Magnitsky Act – Behind the Scenes, had been paid for in advance, presumably on the assumption that Nekrasov would only be too happy to confirm Browder’s story. However, Nekrasov conscientiously examined relevant documentation, and realised during the process of making the film, that the story was a scam. The film was ready in 2016. At this point, remember, when a civil war was raging in Ukraine, it was particularly important to stress that Russia and Putin were evil.

The première at the European Parliament was stopped at the last moment, and screenings were cancelled all over Europe, including in Norway, where the film was made. In other words: The film was censored! As Nekrasov explains in his conversation with Glenn Diesen and Alexander Mercouris, the very fact of being censored in the West, was deeply shocking, deeply troubling. What he basically is saying, I think, is that the West is not what he thought it was. “Sometimes I feel that I’m back in the USSR,” says Sergei Nekrasov.

I haven’t seen the film, but you might find it here.