Text b. Were Stalin's crimes really less wicked than Hitler's? (The Telegraph, September 15, 2010) By Daniel Hannan

 

Jonathan Freedland is a decent sort, and his report from Lithuania, where he is making a programme for the BBC, is characteristically reasonable. Reasonable but, I’m afraid, mistaken.

Jonathan is upset by the way in which Stalin’s crimes are given parity with Hitler’s in the Baltic States, something he calls the “double genocide” argument:

The symmetry here is false. No one wants to top the persecution league table, but nor can one accept that those who were “arrested, interrogated and imprisoned” – to quote the Vilnius museum – suffered the same fate as those Jews who were murdered, despite the exhibit’s attempt to equalise them under the bland umbrella term “losses”. The oppression of the Soviet years was terrible, but it was not genocide: to be arrested is not to be shot into a pit.

By chance, I am reading Jonathan’s piece in Riga, where I have just visited the Museum of the Occupation of Latvia. The display here also implies a “double genocide”, although that phrase isn’t used. Behind the glass panes are grisly relics left behind by victims of both the Nazis and the Soviets. There are artefacts cobbled together by inmates of the gulags: primitive dentures made to replace the teeth lost through poor diet, face-masks to ward off the swarms of Siberian midges. There is a note scrawled by a mother to her children as she was hauled away by the NKVD, never to return: convinced that she was the victim of a clerical error, she asked them to remember to water the plants in the dining room. And, of course, there are horrible images of the Nazi pogroms, with a frank acceptance of the role that local people played in rounding up their Jewish neighbours.

Latvia’s Jews suffered disproportionately at the hands of both sets of occupiers. Around five per cent of the Latvian population in 1939 was Jewish, but Jews accounted for ten per cent of the Red Army’s victims. Why? Because Latvian Jews were generally better educated and wealthier than their gentile neighbours, making them prime targets for the Chekas, who sought to eliminate capitalists, intellectuals and other potential anti-Soviet elements.

This raises an important moral question. Is the classification of human beings by income or education more justifiable than their classification by race or religion? The Nazis and the Soviets both tended to murder people by category rather than as individuals. In neither case was innocence a defence. The essential wickedness of both ideologies was the same: whatever you had or hadn’t done, you might find yourself on a death list. I struggle to see how one form of categorisation is more benign than the other.

But what about Jonathan’s main argument, namely that deportation is not as bad as murder? Well, the guide who showed me round the Riga museum – and who was very obviously a man of the Left – told me something that astonished me: the survival rate in Soviet gulags during the Second World War was lower than in Nazi concentration camps. While the stated intention of the gulags might not have been murder, that was their practical effect, as everyone understood. Around 1.6 million people perished in the camps before Stalin’s death in 1953. Of those who returned, few recovered their physical or mental health.

Here are some more figures. When the Red Army occupied the Baltic States in 1940, 130,000 men, women and children were deported or executed. During the Nazi occupation, between 1941 and 1944, 300,000 more were exiled or murdered – overwhelmingly Jews, and overwhelmingly in Lithuania. When the Soviets came back in 1944, they rounded up a further 400,000 people over the next decade, mainly kulaks. All in all, some ten per cent of the adult population was lost. You can understand why people remember the period as one long calamity.

Jonathan is on surer ground when he complains that the victims of the USSR are more visibly mourned than those of the Third Reich. But he is honest enough to acknowledge the obvious explanation. Most people in the Baltic States have had first-hand experience of Soviet repression, whereas the Nazi occupation is recalled only by the very elderly. When Balts commemorate the victims of Communism, they are remembering their own fathers, uncles, grandmothers, not simply faces in old photographs.

Jonathan is not the first Guardian writer to complain about Stalin being lumped with Hitler. Here is the Labour MP Denis MacShane:

There is a deeper Rightwing revisionism at play. Stalin’s crimes are being elevated to a par with the exterminations of Jews by those who want to banalise or relativise the Holocaust and reduce its historical centrality to just another example of wartime mass murders. Stalin’s famines of the 1930s or his deportations in the 1940s are held up as the Right creates its own moral equivalence between Nazism and Communism.

Re-read that passage and you’ll see how offensive it is. Those who emphasise Communism’s crimes, says MacShane, are secretly trying to downgrade the Holocaust. He doesn’t allow the possibility that you might find both Hitlerism and Stalinism evil, or that you might recognise how much the two men had in common. Indeed, if “the Right” makes such a moral equivalence, it is perhaps because Rightists understand that the horrors of Nazism and Communism spring from a common root, namely the exaltation of the state over the individual. Still, I don’t think you need to be a conservative to be equally repelled by two systems which justify the systematic liquidation of civilians in pursuit of perverted doctrines.

But here’s the thing. Outside those countries occupied by the Red Army, you rarely find such equivalence. While Nazism is well understood as the monstrosity it was, there is often a lingering sense that Communism was well-intentioned, even though it went wrong. The merest connection with fascism bars a politician from office; yet those who actively supported the USSR are allowed to become ministers and European Commissioners. Wearing a Che Guevara tee-shirt is not regarded in the same light as wearing an Adolf Hitler tee-shirt; but it should be.

Don’t get me wrong. Every atrocity is unique in its own terrible way. The Nazi Holocaust haunts us for good reasons. Months after I saw it, I still find this image rising, unbidden, in my mind. Happily, though, no one, beyond a deranged fringe, denies the nature of Nazism. The same is not true of the Soviet tyranny.

Even now, Russia refuses to accept that its annexation of the Baltics was an “invasion”. Forty-seven per cent of Russians have a positive view of Stalin (just imagine how we would react if 47 per cent of Germans had a positive view of Hitler). And while the merest and most desultory advances by fascist mini-parties are front-page news, Communist parties that unapologetically took the Soviet line during the Cold War are an accepted part of many legislatures. To deny the magnitude of the Nazi genocide is, in several countries, a criminal offence; but to signal, with your idiotic Che tee-shirt, that you are all for breaking a few eggs to make an omelette, is radical chic. That, surely, is the truly alarming asymmetry.

Exercise 7. Compare separate interpretations by the media of the same event (texts A and B) and point out the similarities and differences among them. Develop an understanding of how coverage of an event by the media can vary depending on the type of media and its source.

Text A. U.S. power plants at risk of attack by computer worm like Stuxnet (The Washington Post)

By Ellen Nakashima Washington Post Foreign Service Friday, October 1, 2010; 2:49 PM

A sophisticated worm designed to infiltrate industrial control systems could be used as a blueprint to sabotage machines that are critical to U.S. power plants, electrical grids and other infrastructure, experts are warning.

The discovery of Stuxnet, which some analysts have called the "malware of the century" because of its ability to damage or possibly destroy sensitive control systems, has served as a wake-up call to industry officials. Even though the worm has not yet been found in control systems in the United States, it could be only a matter of time before similar threats show up here.

"Quite honestly you've got a blueprint now," said Michael J. Assante, former chief security officer at the North American Electric Reliability Corporation, an industry body that sets standards to ensure the electricity supply. "A copycat may decide to emulate it, maybe to cause a pressure valve to open or close at the wrong time. You could cause damage, and the damage could be catastrophic."

Joe Weiss, an industrial control system security specialist and managing partner at Applied Control Solutions in Cupertino, Calif., said "the really scary part" about Stuxnet is its ability to determine what "physical process it wants to blow up." Said Weiss: "What this is, is essentially a cyber weapon."

Researchers still do not know who created Stuxnet, or why.

The antivirus security firm Symantec analyzed the worm this summer and, by taking control of servers it had been connected to, determined that the malware had infected about 45,000 computers around the world. Most of those infected - about 30,000 - were in Iran. Those computers were not the targets, but the finding suggested that the target was nearby.

Speculation has focused on Iran's nuclear enrichment facilities, and this week Iranian officials said they suspect a foreign organization or nation designed the worm.

The United States has a covert program to sabotage the systems that undergird Iran's nuclear facilities. Some experts have also suggested that other countries, including Israel, could be behind Stuxnet.

Joel F. Brenner, former national counterintelligence executive and a former senior counsel at the National Security Agency, said he thinks it is unlikely that the United States created the worm. "We don't do anything on purpose that we can't really target and control," he said.

Brenner, who has long warned of such a threat to the electric grids, also cautioned against assuming a nation state was behind it. A group at a "premier technical institute" in the United States, China, Israel or Russia, could have carried it off, he said.

Siemens, a German-headquartered multinational company, has identified 15 cases of infections on customers' plants worldwide; the single largest concentration - five - was found in Germany. Each customer was able to detect the worm and remove it without harm to their operations, spokesman Alexander Machowetz said.

Still, the possibility that Stuxnet could be used by copycats, even those who don't intend to do harm with it, is causing concern among experts.

"Stuxnet opened Pandora's box," said Ralph Langner, a German researcher whose early analysis of the worm's ability to target control systems raised public awareness of the threat. "We don't need to be concerned about Stuxnet, but about the next-generation malware we will see after Stuxnet."

Sean McGurk, director of the U.S. National Cybersecurity and Communications Integration Center at the Department of Homeland Security, said that the department posted its first report to industry recommending steps to mitigate the effects of Stuxnet on July 15. But "not even two days later," he said, a hacker Web site posted the code so that others could use it to exploit the vulnerabilities in Microsoft.

"So we know that once the information is out in the wild, people are taking it and they're modifying it," he said.

While analysts still do not know what the creators of Stuxnet were targeting, this much is known:

* It exploited four Microsoft "zero-day" vulnerabilities, allowing Stuxnet to spread automatically without computers users' knowledge.

* One vulnerability allowed the worm to spread via the use of a thumb drive or other removable device. That flaw and one other have since been patched.

* It is autonomous - it requires no hidden hand at the control stick to direct its moves.

* It targeted a specific kind of Siemens software that runs on industrial control systems from water sanitization to oil pipelines and nuclear plants.

* Once it found its target, it was designed to inject code into the controller to change a process. What that process is, is not yet known.

* Time stamps on pieces of the code suggest it was created in early 2009.

* It was first reported in June by VirusBlokAda, a Belarus security firm.

Assante, formerly of the North American Electric Reliability Corp., also known as NERC, noted that Stuxnet was built to take advantage of weaknesses in industrial systems. For instance, the worm banked most industrial plants' reliance on third parties to perform maintenance and assist in troubleshooting, and these outsiders often plug thumb drives or other removable media into the systems.

The irony, he said, is that industry has long known about these gaps and high-risk practices.

"We know so much about what we need to address," said Assante, now president of the National Board of Information Security Examiners. "We just need a more organized way of addressing the weakness."

Recently, in light of Stuxnet, NERC issued an update to electric power companies, making recommendations for protection, but said that companies would "not be subject to penalties for a failure to implement" them.

Stuxnet underscores the need to strengthen the defense of critical industrial systems, lawmakers say. "While industry attitudes and awareness have improved in the last few years, the same broken systems are in many cases still in place, leaving our nation vulnerable to attacks," said Rep. Jim Langevin (D-R.I.), who this week introduced legislation to allow the administration to regulate these critical systems and to expand the Department of Homeland Security's authority to enforce the rules.

Several weeks ago, a control system monitoring pressure in a natural gas pipeline in San Bruno, Calif., malfunctioned, resulting in an explosion and fire that killed eight people.

"This is what you could do unintentionally," said Weiss, the industrial control system security specialist. "Think about Stuxnet, where you could start doing things intentionally."

Text B. Stuxnet worm brings cyber warfare out of virtual world (AFP, October 1, 2010)

By Pascal Mallet (AFP)

BRUSSELS — A mysterious computer worm that has struck Iran has raised the spectre of a cyber attack as a new weapon of war, a danger NATO identifies as a key threat, experts say.

The 28-nation transatlantic alliance will highlight the cyber menace in its new "strategic concept" that will be adopted at a NATO summit in Lisbon next month, according to diplomats.

The danger became all too real with the emergence of Stuxnet in recent weeks, dubbed the world's "first cyber superweapon" by experts, and which has wreaked havoc on computerised industrial equipment in Iran.

"Are we armed against similar operations? We can ask ourselves on the security of control systems for industries, energy distribution networks or transport," said Daniel Ventre, author of the book "Information Warfare."

"This operation aims to destroy key computer networks, it is not a more common action such as hacking, spying or the dissemination of false information," said Ventre, of the National Scientific Research Centre in Paris.

The virus targets control systems made by German industrial giant Siemens commonly used to manage water supplies, oil rigs, power plants and other industrial facilities.

Chinese media reported this week that Stuxnet had spread to China, infecting millions of computers around the country.

The source of the worm strike on Iran remains unknown, although suspicion has fallen on Israel and the United States, which fear that Tehran is using its nuclear programme to build an atomic bomb, a charge denied by Iran.

Axel Dyevre, a director at the European Company for Strategic Intelligence, said Stuxnet represented "an escalation towards the potential military or political use" of vulnerable computer systems.

The next major conflict could indeed be launched with a traditional bombing campaign in tandem with a cyber blitz, an electronic Pearl Harbor paralysing the enemy.

NATO, which was lightly hassled by Serbian hackers during the Kosovo war in 1999, has gradually stepped up efforts to protect its own networks since 2002.

The United States urged the alliance last month to build a cyber fortress around its vital military and economic infrastructures.

"NATO has a nuclear shield, it is building a stronger and stronger defence shield, it needs a cyber shield as well," US Deputy Defence Secretary William Lynn said in Brussels on September 15.

The US government kicked off an exercise dubbed "Cyber Storm III" on Tuesday to simulate a large-scale cyber attack on critical infrastructure, with the participation of 60 private companies and 12 international partners.

Stephan De Spiegeleire, a defence expert at the Hague Centre for Strategic Studies, said it was critical for civilians to prepare for the prospect of a computer invasion as well.

"It wouldn't be like the exodus of May 1940, when millions of French and Belgian citizens fled their towns on the road during World War II. This time populations would suddenly be left without electricity, hot water, heating and television," he said.

Aware of the growing danger, the European Union's executive arm proposed new regulations on Thursday to boost the 27-nation bloc's computer defences by improving cooperation against cyber threats.

Several EU states were the target of a botnet, a network of computers infected by malicious software, called 'Conficker' in early 2009, which affected the computers of armed forces in France, Germany and Britain.

A cyber attack against Estonia in 2007 cost the Baltic States between 19 million and 28 million euros.

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