Garry Kasparov's Blog, page 52

“The U.S.S.R. Fell—and the World Fell Asleep” |WSJ| Dec 16th, 2016

via The Wall Street Journal

Twenty-five years after the Soviet Union ceased to exist, plenty of repressive regimes live on. Today, the free world no longer cares.

By GARRY KASPAROV

Dec. 16, 2016

A quarter-century ago, on Dec. 25, 1991, as the last Soviet premier, Mikhail Gorbachev, resigned after a final attempt to keep the Communist state alive, I was so optimistic for the future. That year and the years leading up to that moment were a period when anything felt possible. The ideals of freedom and democracy seemed within the reach of the people of the Soviet Union.

I remember the December evening in 1988 when I was having dinner with friends and my mother in Paris. My family and I still lived in Baku, capital of the then-Soviet Republic of Azerbaijan, where I was raised, but I had become accustomed to unusual freedoms since becoming the world chess champion in 1985. I was no longer accompanied by KGB minders everywhere I went, although my whereabouts were always tracked. Foreign travel still required special approval, which served to remind every Soviet citizen that this privilege could be withdrawn at any time.

My status protected me from many of the privations of life in the Soviet Union, but it did not tint my vision rose. Instead, my visits to Western Europe confirmed my suspicions that it was in the U.S.S.R. where life was distorted, as in a funhouse mirror.

That night in Paris was a special one, and we were joined by the Czech-American director Miloš Forman via a mutual friend, the Czech-American grandmaster Lubomir Kavalek. We were discussing politics, of course, and I was being optimistic as usual. I was sure that the Soviet Union would be forced to liberalize socially and economically to survive.

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Mr. Forman played the elder voice of reason to my youthful exuberance. I was only 25, while he had lived through what he saw as a comparable moment in history. He cautioned that he had seen similar signs of a thaw after reformer Alexander Dubček had become president in Czechoslovakia in 1968. Eight months after Dubček’s election, his reforms ended abruptly as the U.S.S.R. sent half a million Warsaw Pact troops into Czechoslovakia and occupied the country. Many prominent Czechs, like Messrs. Forman and Kavalek, fled abroad.

“Gorbachev’s perestroika is another fake,” Mr. Forman warned us about the Soviet leader’s loosening of state controls, “and it will end up getting more hopeful people killed.” I insisted that Mr. Gorbachev would not be able to control the forces he was unleashing. Mr. Forman pressed me for specifics: “But how will it end, Garry?”

I replied—specifics not being my strong suit—that “one day, Miloš, you will wake up, open your window, and they’ll be gone.”

It is difficult to describe what life in the U.S.S.R. was like to people in the free world today. This is not because repressive dictatorships are an anachronism people can’t imagine, like trying to tell your incredulous children that there was once a world without cellphones and the internet. The U.S.S.R. ceased to exist in 1991, but there are plenty of repressive, authoritarian regimes thriving in 2016. The difference, and I am sad to say it, is that the citizens of the free world don’t much care about dictatorships anymore, or about the 2.7 billion people who still live in them.

The words of John F. Kennedy in 1963 Berlin sound naive to most Americans today: “Freedom is indivisible, and when one man is enslaved, all are not free,” he said. That for decades the U.S. government based effective foreign policy on such lofty ideals seems as distant as a world without iPhones.

Ronald Reagan’s warning that “freedom is never more than one generation away from extinction” was never meant to be put to the test, but it is being tested now. If anything, Reagan’s time frame of a generation was far too generous. The dramatic expansion of freedom that occurred 25 years ago may be coming undone in 25 months.

The fall of the Berlin Wall and the collapse of the U.S.S.R. was the end of watch for the anti-Communist coalition formed by Harry Truman after World War II. A year later, baby boomer Bill Clinton was making jokes with Russia’s President Boris Yeltsin and it was time to party, not press the advantage. The U.S. had unrivaled global power and influence, more than at any other time in history. Yet instead of using it to shape a new global framework to protect and project the values of democracy and human rights—as Truman had done immediately to put Stalin in check—the free world acted as though the fight had been won once and for all.

Even worse, we made the same mistake in Russia and in many other newly independent states. We were so eager to embrace the bright future that we failed to address our dark past. There were no truth commissions, no lustration—the shining of light on past crimes and their perpetrators—no accountability for decades of repression. Elections did nothing to uproot the siloviki, the powerful network of security and military officials. The offices and titles of the ruling nomenklatura changed, but the Soviet bureaucratic caste remained as power brokers with no accountability or transparency.

The reforms in Russia enacted by a dream team of national and foreign economists were piecemeal and easily exploited by those with access to the levers of power. Instead of turning into a free market, the Russian economy became a rigged auction that created an elite of appointed billionaires and a population of resentful and confused citizens who wondered why nothing had improved for them.

We in Russia naively equated democracy with wealth, as if the ballot box functioned like an ATM—and we looked on enviously as many of our former Warsaw Pact brethren enjoyed the benefits of massive Western investment. With so few strings attached to the loans and credits Russia received, it was easy for the well-connected to game and profit from the system.

President Yeltsin saw no advantage in building robust institutions that might challenge his authority. This led to corruption under his administration. But it had far more severe consequences when someone far more ruthless replaced him.

When Vladimir Putin took power in 2000, he found few obstacles capable of resisting his instinct to remake Russia in his own KGB image. He also found a Russian public that felt betrayed by the promises of democracy and afraid of the violence and corruption we saw all around us. Mr. Putin’s vulgar rhetoric of security and national pride would have worn thin quickly had the price of oil not begun to skyrocket in the new millennium.

A rising cash flow enabled him to negotiate a Faustian bargain with the Russian people: your freedoms in return for stability. Few envisioned how far he would go in collecting on that bargain, but that’s always the trap with empowering authoritarians. Every step Mr. Putin took without consequences encouraged him to take another, and another.

Outside Russia, at every turn, Europe and the U.S. failed to provide the leadership the historic moment required. Russia was declared the successor of the U.S.S.R. with little argument, even being awarded a coveted spot in the G-7 in 1997. Mr. Putin first used that gift to validate his democratic credentials—and later to expose the hypocrisy of the leaders of the free world, who continued to indulge him as he ripped up Russian democracy root and branch.

Even today, members of the Western democratic establishment praise Mr. Putin as a “strong leader”—as he enters his 17th year of total power in an imploding Russia that millions have fled. The bedrock belief of the Cold War, that the U.S. and the rest of the free world would be safer and stronger by promoting human rights and democracy, has been abandoned in the West in favor of engagement and moral equivalence.

To paraphrase Tolstoy, every repressive state is repressive in its own way—but socialism has proved uniquely toxic. The utopian communist idea competed directly with capitalism and lost. Instead of admitting this failure, Soviet leaders squeezed the soul from their citizens by forcing them to perform in the macabre perversion of human nature that is totalitarian socialism.

Right-wing dictatorships like those of Taiwan, South Africa, Portugal and Chile made smooth transitions to vibrant democracy and the free market. Left-wing regimes have had a far harder time, as if socialism were an autoimmune virus that destroys a society’s ability to defend itself from tyrants and demagogues.

The story of human progress is striving, dreaming and sacrificing for a better future. Instead of believing that happy, successful individuals make for a successful society, socialism insists that a perfectly functioning system will produce happy individuals. When the system comes first, the individual becomes an afterthought. When the system fails, individuals are blamed for not surrendering to it enough. Recovering from a regime that restricts individual freedom is far easier than recovering from one that teaches that individual freedom is worthless.

The people I met in the West in the 1980s were intensely curious about the Soviet Union, even if they called us all “Russians.” Cold War enmity led to a great deal of mythologizing, but there was also sincere concern for the hundreds of millions of people living behind the Iron Curtain. Westerners often asked how they could help, something that is rarely heard in today’s environment of appeasement and isolationism. A time when dictatorship is not seen as a discrete problem—when in fact it is the dominant crisis that enables so many others, including war, terror and refugees. The architects of the Cold War understood that there could be no lasting peace unless the Soviet Union was contained and opposed at every turn. That lesson has been forgotten, along with so many others.

In the old days, I was also asked regularly why I did not defect instead of spending half my time fighting my nemesis Anatoly Karpov at the chessboard and the other half fighting with the Soviet authorities. My answer was always the same, that I wanted to change my country and improve things for everyone, not just for myself. I attempted to use the slight protection my fame provided me to speak out whenever I could. The same was true when I retired from chess in 2005 to join the opposition to Vladimir Putin’s crackdown on Russian democracy and civil society.

Today, I live in exile New York City, driven there not by the Soviets but by a bloodthirsty Putin regime that has no ideology beyond power and money. My medals and awards as a representative of the U.S.S.R. offered me some safety there, but today my name is being purged from the Russian record books.

A year after that 1988 dinner in Paris, Miloš Forman called me from Prague. He said, “Garry, you were right. I opened the window one morning and they were gone.”

Within two years, the U.S.S.R. would also vanish beneath my feet. Yet 25 years later, the thugs and despots are flourishing once again. They still reject liberal democracy and the free market—not because of a competing ideology like communism, but because they understand that those things are a threat to their power.

The internet was going to connect every living soul and shine a light into the dark corners of the world. Instead, the light has reflected back to illuminate the hypocrisy and apathy of the most powerful nations in the world. Crimea is annexed, Ukraine is invaded, ISIS is rallying, Aleppo is laid waste, and not a one of us can say that we did not know. We can say only that we did not care.

Globalization has made it easy for the enemies of the free world to spread their influence in ways the Soviet leadership couldn’t have imagined, while the West has lost the will to defend itself and its values. It’s enough to make you afraid to open the window.

Mr. Kasparov is the chairman of the New York-based Human Rights Foundation and the author of “Winter Is Coming: Why Vladimir Putin and the Enemies of the Free World Must be Stopped” (PublicAffairs, 2015).

What exactly does Putin want from Trump?| Hardball at MSNBC | Jan 2nd, 2017

Garry Kasparov and Feature Story News’ Simon Marks talk to Chris Matthews about what Vladimir Putin might seek out from Donald Trump’s administration in 2017.

Duration: 5:30

Testimony before the Canadian House of Commons | December 7th, 2016

Testimony before the Canadian House of Commons

Standing Committee on Foreign Affairs and International Development (FAAE)

Special Economic Measures Act hearing

December 7, 2016

Garry Kasparov – Chairman of the Human Rights Foundation:

“I am here today to speak about the nature, the goals, and the methods of the Russian regime of Vladimir Putin. I am not an outsider or an objective observer of these things. No one can be, or should be, objective about repression, torture, murder, and war. We do not owe Putin’s victims objectivity; we owe them the truth.

Vladimir Putin is about to celebrate seventeen years of uninterrupted, unchallenged power in Russia. He was elected in 2000, after being handpicked by Boris Yeltsin, and that was the last meaningful vote Russia ever had. Democracy in Russia has been systematically destroyed, along with every other aspect of civil society that might challenge Putin’s hold on power.

Do not speak of Putin’s supposed popularity to an informed Russian. A popular leader does not need to fake elections or destroy the free media or jail critics or kill opposition leaders. Status that is artificially fashioned by twenty-four-hour propaganda, repression of all dissent, and the elimination of all rivals is not approval, it is acceptance.

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In the first years of Putin’s rule, he was relatively weak and he still needed friends abroad. He made very good use of G8 membership even as he cracked down at home. How could critics like me, like Boris Nemtsov, be right when we said Putin was an authoritarian when he was welcomed as an equal with open arms and big smiles by the leaders of the free world?

The social contract Putin had with the Russian people was that he would create stability in exchange for our freedom. As oil prices fell, Putin was forced to renege on that contract. In 2011 and 2012, hundreds of thousands of Russians marched in the streets to protest election corruption and economic failure. Putin’s answer, as we now all know, was repression, propaganda, and war. To distract and rally the people, Putin no longer needed friends internationally; he needed enemies—big enemies. Anti-Western, especially anti-American, propaganda on Russian television is far more vicious than anything that ever existed in the Soviet Union in my lifetime. This war propaganda has been followed by real war, the invasion and annexation of Crimea, first denied by Putin and later proudly confirmed.

When the offensive slowed in Ukraine, Putin needed a new target, a new place to look tough: Syria. Putin isn’t there for ISIS, of course. He is there to prop up his ally Bashar Assad and to produce lots of exciting war footage for Russian television. Putin is very good at finding places where no one with the power to stop him will stand up to him. Georgia, Ukraine, Syria. The danger is that he may eventually misjudge where he can go because he has encountered so little resistance so far.

To better guarantee his hold on power, Putin has targeted the only forces he sees as threats: NATO, the European Union, and the United States. Putin has worked actively for years to undermine the unity of the free world with propaganda and by supporting politicians who share his goals. Putin’s machine supports movements like Brexit, far-right groups like those of Marine Le Pen in France and Golden Dawn in Greece, and potential agents of chaos like Donald Trump. Now Italy is on the brink.

Cyber-war, information war, the export of corruption and intimidation, these are weapons Putin uses frequently and effectively. Something must be done, and soon, because the price of stopping him will only continue to rise. Putin cannot go back to being friends; his power in Russia depends on eternal confrontation. There is no common ground, and seeking it only wastes time and further emboldens him. The language of appeasement is comforting, and politically convenient domestically, but it has always failed to stop foreign dictators, and it will always fail.

To stop Putin, to deter his aggression, you must target the only thing he cares about: his hold on power in Russia. The best way to target Putin’s power is to take aim at his agents and cronies, those who wield the levers of power and who benefit the most from Putin’s rule. By forcing Putin’s elite to choose between him and their comfortable lifestyles abroad, it is still possible to create a split, or at least to deter the worst of his aggressions. The individuals who can influence Putin must be targeted or there can be no effective deterrence. Putin does not care about the Russian people, the Russian economy, or the image of Russia abroad. I repeat: he does not care.

Dictators do not ask “why?”, they only ask “why not?” Deterrence is the answer. Very strong penalties must be ready and widely known. Deterrence is difficult because its fruits are not apparent. If it works, nothing happens. To those who say that sanctions have not worked, can you say what Putin might have done without them in place? Or say why he works so frantically to have them repealed?

Ten years ago, when I would give testimony like this, I was told that Putin was a Russian problem. I said yes, but unless he is contained, soon he will be a regional problem, and then he will be everyone’s problem. Today, Putin is in Ukraine, in Syria, meddling in American elections, waging global cyber-war, sponsoring fascists across Europe, and spreading fake news and propaganda worldwide.

The alternative to appeasement is not war, it is deterrence. The best way to avoid a conflict is to convince your opponent that he will lose. A Canadian Magnitsky Act will demonstrate the will to stand up in order to prevent more aggression. It will send the message that there are consequences for torture, for murder, and for war. It will be the most effective weapon against Putin’s new type of hybrid war of propaganda and intimidation. Make no mistake, there is a war going on whether you want to admit it or not. And it is very easy to lose a war that you refuse to acknowledge even exists.”

More about Garry Kasparov’s testimony to Canadian Parliament:

“Putin critic urges Canada to adopt sanctions against Russian officials” by CAMPBELL CLARK

Obama vows action against Russia | The Last Word with Lawrence O’Donnell | Dec 15th, 2016

President Obama said Thursday “we need to take action and we will” against Russia for interference in the election. Russian pro-democracy leader and famed chess champion Garry Kasparov joins Lawrence, saying he doesn’t need “intel” to verify Putin’s nefarious role.

 

Kasparov on Russian hacking of US election | Cavuto @FoxBusiness| Dec 13th, 2016

Dec. 13, 2016 – 3:47 – ‘Winter is Coming’ author Garry Kasparov on why he thinks that Russia hacked the 2016 election.

Watch the latest video at video.foxbusiness.com

As Robots Replace Old Jobs, New Jobs Should Be Invented | NY Times |

by Garry Kasparov

Read original article at the New York Times 

DECEMBER 5, 2016, 3:21 AM

Machines have been replacing humans since the first one was invented many thousands of years ago — and on the very next day, it probably created new jobs when three people were needed to fix it. Humans are adaptable. We’re creative. We use machines to make new things, solve new problems and create whole industries that we can’t yet imagine. Doomsaying is easy and natural. We can see what’s being lost, but we don’t see the new things until they arrive.

As I learned in my chess matches against the IBM computer Deep Blue 20 years ago, humans will always find a way to build machines that replicate human performance. And while humans still play chess, entire professions will continue to go the way of the elevator operator as machines become more capable. The good news is that intelligent machines also liberate us from tedious labor, letting us be more imaginative and more ambitious — although of course one person’s “liberated” is another person’s “unemployed,” at least in the short term.

Human ambition is the key to staying ahead of automation, and that’s what worries me far more than killer robots. The huge increases in productivity that machines provide must be invested aggressively, not squandered. We’re very good at teaching machines how to do our old jobs — so the solution is to keep inventing new ones. The only job security for the human race is to press into the new and the unknown.

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Topics: Culture, Science, Technology, artificial intelligence

Garry Kasparov, the chairman of the Human Rights Foundation and a former world chess champion, is the author of the forthcoming book, “Deep Thinking.” He is on Twitter (@Kasparov63).

Kasparov: ‘It’s a Fact Russia Helped Trump’ | Playboy Magazine | Dec 1st, 2016

By Alexander Bisley 

Read original article at Playboy.com

December 1, 2016

At just 22 years old, Garry Kasparov became a world chess champion. A Russian intellectual and sporting icon, Kasparov played chess up to fifteen moves ahead, even toppling IBM’s super computer Deep Blue in their first of two encounters. Often considered the game’s all-time great, he spent two decades at the top before quitting in 2005 to help lead the democracy movement against Russia’s dictator Vladimir Putin. In September 2001, Putin gulled Washington by being the first foreign leader to call President George W. Bush and declare his support for Bush’s “war on terror.” Bush later said he looked into Putin’s eyes and saw “a good soul.”

Kasparov, however, knew that Putin was wreaking havoc in Chechnya to cement his reign of terror. In 2009, Kasparov, who has long dismissed the fallacy that Putin is legitimately popular in Russia, was jailed for five days for protesting Russia’s 2008 elections, which many nationals believed to be rigged. In his March 2010 Playboy Interview, he noted “Ninety-nine percent of Chechen votes went to United Russia? Come on. Putin is the architect of the second Chechen war, which destroyed Grozny, the Chechen capital.” Two years later, Kasparov spent another five days in a Russian slammer after being arrested for protesting outside Pussy Riot’s show trial sentencing.

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Winter Is Coming, Kasparov’s 2015 book detailing Putin’s rise and his threat, came out in paperback the day Donald Trump was elected. “It took just eight years for Russia to go from jubilant crowds celebrating the collapse of the Soviet Union in 1992 to the ascendance of former KGB agent Vladimir Putin to the presidency. Then it took Putin another eight years to corrupt or dismantle nearly every democratic element in the country,” reads one sharp, prescient passage. I phoned Kasparov on Thanksgiving Eve at his New York City home, where he has lived in self-imposed exile since 2013. Kasparov, who now chairs the Human Rights Foundation and is known for his brusque charisma and flashes of mordant wit, brought his fierce intellect, intense presence and forceful style as we discussed the fear of a Trump presidency and a Republican-controlled government moving social issues back to the 17th century.

After Trump’s election, Russian Deputy Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov told a state-run news agency that “there were contacts” with the Trump team, saying “Obviously, we know most of the people from his entourage.” Do you believe Russia is responsible for Trump’s election?

The whole story of the rise of Donald Trump is extraordinary. Putin believes that if you’re strong enough and if your opponent is not responding, you can go as far as you want. For Putin, who’s always looking for an opportunity to show his strength and militancy, attacking the American political system was the highest prize of all. Now, President Barack Obama is very much reaping the harvest of his weak foreign policy because Russia tried to demonstrate its political might by attacking the very foundation of American democracy. It’s a fact that Russia definitely helped Donald Trump to be elected by revealing all these emails that were hacked, stolen from John Podesta and the DNC. Maybe Russia went even beyond that.

Extraordinarily, the NSA Director Michael Rogers said that there was “a conscious effort by a nation-state to attempt to achieve a specific effect.”

I agree that’s extraordinary. You have one of the top security chiefs of the United States pointing at Russia. Clearly it’s Russia. If this is correct, that means it comes as close as one can imagine to a declaration of war. The very mechanism of American democracy—the foundation of power—was in danger by interference of a hostile foreign power. And what did Obama do? Nothing.

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Where are the Democrats? I’m surprised Chuck Schumer isn’t demanding a full-scale congressional investigation.
”

Shouldn’t this be a bipartisan national security issue?

I’m surprised Chuck Schumer isn’t demanding a full-scale congressional investigation. Where are the Democrats? I understand Hillary Clinton’s campaign is demoralised, but still, I want to hear more. It’s quite serious. It’s so amazing that it’s Democrats who were targeted by Putin.

During the election, you described Trump’s links with Putin as “very sinister” and slammed him as Putin’s “perfect agent.”

We could suspect Trump having some kind of ties with Russian oligarchs because we know there was a massive infusion of foreign money to save him from bankruptcy in 2008 and 2009. I believe that’s one of the reasons he hasn’t released his tax returns, which I think is wrong. It’s morally and ethically wrong. The question is, what percentage of his money did come from Russia? Maybe it was an investment, maybe there were other strings attached.

Trump denounced every opportunity to blame Putin and blame Russia for the hacks and attacks on the American electoral system. Even after being briefed by American intelligence, he didn’t want to denounce Putin. For somebody who was inconsistent in almost everything, being so consistent in defending Putin raises my suspicions.

Trump had, for a while, Paul Manafort as his Campaign Manager and Manafort was an agent of Putin’s Ukranian puppet Viktor Yanukovych. Manafort won the Republican Convention, secured Trump’s nomination and crushed #NeverTrump. Again, [I have] questions. But as someone who is always looking for tangible evidence, I understand that it could also be Putin’s belief in Trump. Trump, unlike Hillary Clinton, would be the perfect agent of chaos. NATO, the European Union, treaties, agreements—[these are] things that prevent a dictator from going wild. Trump’s deals with Putin could help Putin ruin the institutions that have provided security to Europe and the world. It seems Putin expects Trump to behave like a dealmaker who doesn’t care about values and America’s role as leader of the free world. They’re both egotistical oligarchs.

Vice President-elect Mike Pence recently went to see Hamilton on Broadway in New York, where fellow attendees booed him and the cast addressed him personally. Afterward, Trump intemperately attacked cast members and producers. How did you react to that?

The President-elect of the United States giving a lecture to an actor who just expressed his views on stage?! It’s a free country. If you don’t like it, you walk away. I’m an optimist. I understand Americans want to give Trump a chance: they hope the magnanimity of the office will change his nature. But I have my doubts. So far, the leopard doesn’t change his spots. I worry Trump will shoot down the first amendment.

You sharply defend anti-Trump protestors on your Twitter account saying, “This ‘the protesters are paid by CIA/Soros/Jews’ garbage is the same attack used against us in Russia. And probably by the same people!” What’s your advice to anti-Trump protestors?

There are always similarities between people who are opposing freedom—whether here [in the USA] or there [in Russia], they always look for conspiracies. The normal inclination of free people is to protest if they don’t like something. Protesters should campaign to amend the constitution so presidential elections are decided by the popular vote. The Electoral College is ridiculous. Someone in Ohio doesn’t deserve more of a say than someone in New York.

It seems VP-elect Mike Pence and some fellow Republican social conservatives go along with Trump’s Putin connection as their political voting records share similarities with Putin’s suppression of women, the LGBT community and sexual freedom in general. What do you think?

This is a big problem of the Republican party. Trump lost the popular vote. It’s two million votes that he lost by. The millennial vote clearly shows that the country’s moving into the 21st century. I was always troubled to find my spot in American political life because socially I’m very liberal. But I’m a fiscal conservative, for a strong national defence.

There’s nothing that can be more alien in my eyes than fighting things like abortion rights and minority rights, LGBT rights and other issues on the social front in the 21st century. Those wars are gone. You have to look into the future.

The fact is that some elements of GOP have sympathies to Putin. It tells me they look at the world through a very narrow window. This is the problem: they still have too many people fanatically believing in some ideas. Vladimir Putin doesn’t share their beliefs on other issues. It’s narrow-minded, it’s stupid and it will have bad consequences.

One problem in America is that the two-party system is totally exhausted now. The coalitions are too big and that’s why the Republican Party can find these obscure elements that believe that they can move things back to the 17th century. Obviously, it’s a substantial faction if they can influence elections. It’s quite tragic that you have a considerable portion of the U.S. population still looking to implement the wrong ideals of the past in the future.

Jeff Sessions is Attorney General, Steve Bannon is Chief Strategist, General Michael Flynn, who trousered loot from Putin and Turkish dictator Erdogan, is National Security Adviser. Should we be scared?

Sessions is an elected senator and I respect the institution. I disagree with many of his positions, especially on the social side. I don’t give any legitimacy to Steve Bannon. He’s a different creature. Real danger comes from Bannon and his like.  We have reasons to suspect Michael Flynn of playing into Putin’s hands. Though he recently called Putin a thug, maybe he meant that as a compliment? He always admired Putin for being a “strong guy.” Flynn’s totally obsessed with this idea of fighting Islamic terrorism with Russia. Putin did nothing to fight Islamic terrorism. The KGB supported Islamic terrorism during the Soviet days to attack Western influences. Putin didn’t bomb ISIS in Syria. He bombed Assad’s opponents. Maybe some of them are not very good guys, but they are definitely not ISIS. I don’t feel comfortable with Michael Flynn being so close to the President’s ear. I’m worried.

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Yes, the Putin regime will fall. The collapse of the regime will lead to the collapse of the country.
”

In Winter Is Coming, you write about what you’ve coined as “the gravity of past success.” In chess, each victory pulls down the victor slightly and makes it harder to put in maximum effort to improve further. Did this rule apply to Hillary Clinton in 2016?

Absolutely. The way the Clintons stopped campaigning two or three weeks before the Election Day tells you that they were thinking about governing. My mother used to tell me “the game is not over till the clock is stopped.” Hillary Clinton was prematurely talking about cabinet positions. She virtually ignored Pennsylvania, Michigan and Wisconsin. She could have had Bernie Sanders, Joe Biden and Elizabeth Warren campaigning there [until the end]. I didn’t see them there. She believed she would win and didn’t want to have to owe anybody anything. If the Democrats had picked Joe Biden as their nominee, he would have won in a landslide against Trump.

Making the whole Democrat party the hostage of Hillary Clinton was wrong. She was the wrong candidate. She was the candidate of the status quo, with too much baggage from the past. The fact that she lost to Donald Trump shows how weak she was as a candidate.

The last time you spoke to Playboy in 2010, you said, “It’s my nature. I have to fight,” Will you still fight?

Absolutely. I’m fighting for what I believe is right. Defining the image of the future is most important. I understand I’m 53 years old so it’s unlikely I will be the one who will implement the changes. Whether I’m talking about geopolitics and how winter is coming, or the free-market versus socialism, or AI and our role in this new robotic society, I believe that I have the experience, expertise, knowledge and analytical abilities to help people shape this future in their minds.

William Faulkner wrote, “The past is never dead. It’s not even past.” Do you agree with him?

Absolutely, the past always returns in one form or another. There are periods in which the past even becomes the dominating factor in the present. Right now we are going through a moment like that because we don’t have a vision for the future. With nothing new on the horizon—no serious investment in space travel or deep sea exploration or anything along those lines—we are looking to the past for ideals. Putin, ISIS and the Iranian theocracy share in common that they are effectively reviving values from the past and having such success because they are not being countered by equally powerful forward-looking forces. I think Ronald Reagan put it most concisely when he said, “Freedom is never more than one generation away from extinction.” We are responsible for reaffirming the values we cherish in the present and finding a path for them into the future, because they are always in danger of being brought back into oblivion. As the motto of Soviet dissidents went, “Do what you must, and so be it.”

Critics of the Putin regime like Anna Politkovskaya, Alexander Litivineko, Boris Nemtsov and many other lesser known names were brutally murdered. As a dissident, does this scare you? In Russia, you walked with armed bodyguards.

I’ve never had security in New York City or anywhere outside of Russia. Of course these things scare me, but I don’t think being fearless is a sign of courage or intellect. The question is how well you control your fear—that’s my definition of bravery. I try not to let it dictate my life and choices. Within reason of course, which is why I don’t travel to Russia nowadays, as that would be a guaranteed one-way ticket.

During an interview, journalist and anti-Putin activist Masha Gessen told me, “I think the tragedy of living in a police state is that it has a way of killing everything, so you get very little variety and there’s a great paucity of cultural conversation and the [ensuing] lack of cultural production.” She left Russia in 2013 because she felt “hopeless.” Do you remain confident that the Putin regime will fall?

Yes, the Putin regime will fall. We know from history the fall of these regimes is always a surprise. My concern is that I could agree with Masha that Russia in its current form has no future. The collapse of the regime will lead to the collapse of the country. I almost guarantee it. How will Russia re-emerge? I don’t know. The longer Putin stays in power, the fewer chances Russia has as a state to survive and play the role that it deserves.

The transition from Putin to whomever replaces him will not be peaceful—which doesn’t mean that we have to stick to Putin because he is the devil we know. The longer he stays in power, the more disruption he will cause to whatever is left of Russian society. Dictators who stay in power too long basically turn their countries into political deserts. And unfortunately animals or trees that can survive in deserts are the most rigid and not the nicest ones.

It’s a problem in the West that very few people understand what it is to live in a police state. Even in the United States, all these things in the Bill of Rights aren’t guaranteed. Maybe this is the big lesson from Trump? People have to be more active in defending their future. Young people need to vote more. Maybe we should see more participation from Silicon Valley. They have immense power. Where are they in this current political turmoil?

What do you hope new readers take away from reading Winter Is Coming, briefly?

Winter Is Coming is a reminder that we must be constantly vigilant and prepared, so winter doesn’t kill us. History doesn’t end.

Alexander Bisley is a writer contributing to assorted publications, including The Guardian. In 2013, he got the scoop that journalist Masha Gessen was leaving Russia. Follow him here.

Social Robotics – AI Conference | Oxford, UK September 15th, 2016

On September 15th, 2016, Garry took part in a Social Robotics AI Conference, hosted by Oxford University in the United Kingdom. The topic of his keynote address was the ultimate AI challenge; how to keep humans and our unique decision-making capabilities – our intuition, moral judgment and creativity – firmly in the loop, while still reaping the benefits of intelligent machines.

Humans started dreaming of intelligent machines long before the computer age and their starting point has always been chess; from the Mechanical Turk of the 18th century to Alan Turing’s chess program and today’s Deep Blue. It has been Garry’s blessing and, he says, his curse, to play a central role in that quest, playing against each generation’s strongest computer champions, contributing to their development and devising new ways for humans and machines to achieve more through partnership than they could ever achieve alone.

He bids us to embrace rather than fear AI’s potential. Human labor has progressively been replaced by technology and we shouldn’t panic if that now extends to cognitive as well as physical work. Let’s focus, he says, on what intelligent machines can enable us to do and how the creativity of this generation can be empowered to use technology creatively in ways previously unimagined.

The first Social Robotics & AI conference united the scientific community, business leaders and builders of human capital and investigated the role of Robotics and AI in our commercial future.

To learn more about the conference and its speakers, please follow the link.

2016 The Choice: How U.S.-Russia relations might change under Trump

Bianna Golodryga

Yahoo News and Finance Anchor

Yahoo NewsNovember 10, 2016

PRESS ON THE IMAGE BELOW TO SEE FULL INTERVIEW

On Thursday, Nov. 10, 2016, Yahoo News and Finance Anchor Bianna Golodryga talks with Garry Kasparov, chairman of the Human Rights Foundation, about Donald Trump’s relationship with Russian President Vladimir Putin and how U.S.-Russia relations might change during Trump’s presidency.

America, Your Election Is Not Rigged | New York Times, Oct 29th, 2016 | by Garry Kasparov

by Garry Kasparov

October 29th, 2016

via New York Times

For the last few weeks, the Republican nominee for president, Donald J. Trump, has been talking a lot about how the Nov. 8 election is rigged against him. In fact, he sounds convinced that the entire campaign season is rigged in favor of his Democratic opponent, Hillary Clinton. These are serious charges, or they would be if Mr. Trump had any idea what he was talking about.

Nobody in the American political establishment is happy about Mr. Trump’s wild-eyed accusations of voter fraud and media conspiracies because they understand that it undermines their own credibility as leaders in a democracy. This is exactly why my country’s leader, Vladimir V. Putin, is so delighted by Mr. Trump’s charges.

In power for 16 years now, Mr. Putin and his global propaganda machine aggressively promote the idea that democracy is a chaotic mess that only the hero Putin can save Russia from falling into. Social media is flooded by Kremlin-funded trolls ranting about the illegitimacy of the American election process and warning of the potential for violence. To have a major party nominee in America repeating this propaganda is beyond Mr. Putin’s wildest dreams. Mr. Trump even echoes Mr. Putin’s authoritarian rationales, presenting himself as the only one who can rescue America.

I know a few things about rigged elections. I know what it’s like to have the overwhelming power of the state used against me to make a mockery of the democratic process. I know what it means to have my opinion censored while every major media outlet is dedicated to vilifying me and my colleagues. I know what happens when a conspiracy of public and private interests forms to intimidate, harass, prosecute and even kill in order to preserve a monopoly on power.

I know these things well because I learned them the hard way during my years as a political opposition leader in Mr. Putin’s Russia. None of these things are happening to Donald Trump.

After I retired from professional chess in 2005, I helped form an opposition coalition, known as Other Russia, to protest Mr. Putin’s increasingly dictatorial regime. According to the Russian Constitution, Mr. Putin was unable to stand for a second re-election as president in 2008, and it wasn’t clear what would happen to a power structure that had become completely centered on one man. If Mr. Putin ignored the Constitution completely and simply stayed on openly as a dictator, he risked alienating the Group of 8 world leaders who had agreed to pretend he was a fellow democrat.

The Other Russia opposition coalition had live debates, policy papers, platforms — all the things that were absent from the official elections, where the only thing that mattered was who had the Kremlin’s blessing. Rather to my surprise, in 2007 I was the winner of the national primary to choose the coalition’s presidential candidate.

Once I had been selected in a real election that wasn’t official, it was time for me to participate in an official election that was completely fake.

In order to do this, I had to jump through the official and unofficial hoops that had been put in place to prevent unapproved candidates from making it onto a ballot. Two million signatures were needed from all over the country in just one month, a task made even more herculean by the sheer size of Russia. A nominating congress had to be held, an apparently simple chore that became impossible when no hotel would rent a suitable space to us. Even American-owned hotel chains mysteriously canceled our reservations.

While I traveled across the country to campaign, we would find venues suddenly closed for repairs, our flights canceled, our meetings shut down by the police. Nor did I quite manage to stay out of jail, spending five days in a Moscow cell for participating in an “unauthorized rally.”

Rigging an election isn’t only a matter of stuffing ballot boxes. It is not even that “the people who cast the votes don’t decide an election, the people who count the votes do,” as the apocryphal quote attributed to Joseph Stalin has it. By the time the voting begins, the game is already over. Anyone who opposes the regime — from peaceful street protesters to the wealthiest man in the country — is targeted. The Russian businessman Mikhail Khodorkovsky spent a decade in prison for daring to support political groups outside of Mr. Putin’s control.

The fraud that does occur on Election Day is more about showing loyalty and getting the numbers just right to keep up appearances. Busloads of official voters go from polling station to polling station in a tradition we even have a name for: a “carousel.” Sheaves of ballots are dumped into urns while polling officials stand in the way to block the view. Sometimes, the excessive zeal of apparatchiks produces returns of more than 100 percent, as happens regularly in Russian regions like Chechnya.

To this day, I do not like the title “former Russian presidential candidate” because I knew at the start that my name would never appear on a ballot. The former prime minister Mikhail M. Kasyanov was allowed to progress one step further in his own independent run in 2008 — before being disqualified two months later.

The only candidates allowed to run in the presidential election against Mr. Putin’s handpicked successor, the former prime minister Dmitri A. Medvedev, were the same token Communist and the same token nationalist who had been running in every election since the collapse of the Soviet Union. Mr. Medvedev got 71.2 percent, a tactful few tenths of a percentage point less than Mr. Putin received in 2004. Four years later, Mr. Medvedev again switched desks with Mr. Putin, who hadn’t left power for a second regardless of his official title of prime minister. President Obama called Mr. Putin to congratulate him on his election victory, once again, as president.

This is the modern dictatorship, savvy at using the free world’s terms and technology for its own ends. And when fake elections at home aren’t enough, an aggressive campaign of intimidation and disinformation abroad can be very useful. The Russian news leads every day with Mr. Trump and WikiLeaks and how they are supposedly exposing the corrupt reality of American democracy. Mr. Putin can no longer pretend to be a democratic leader, so his goal is to drag everyone else down to his level — and he is doing it with Mr. Trump’s help.

A democracy is as strong as its people believe it to be. It cannot be destroyed from the outside, only from within.

Garry Kasparov is the chairman of the New York-based Human Rights Foundation and the author, most recently, of “Winter Is Coming: Why Vladimir Putin and the Enemies of the Free World Must Be Stopped.”

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A version of this op-ed appears in print on October 30, 2016, on page SR1 of the New York edition with the headline: I Know a Rigged Election. This Isn’t One. Today’s Paper|Subscribe