Amazon Seems Not To Like Reviews of The Putin Interviews

UPDATE: A friend at Amazon saw this post, looked into it, and informed me that the whole thing was a mistake: my second review did indeed post; I shouldn’t have received the first email, requiring revisions; I certainly shouldn’t have received the second email, mistakenly informing me that even my revised review wouldn’t do. They’re reviewing what went wrong and will try to fix it.

I figured this was a glitch (as I’ve said in comments, there are 200+ other reviews of the book and of course the book is itself for sale, so suppressing my review would be a pretty shaky means of suppression).

Anyway kudos to Amazon for trying to figure out what went wrong and for trying to fix it.

And again: The Putin Interviews is extremely illuminating and highly recommended.

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I’ve now tried twice to post an Amazon customer review of Oliver Stone’s The Putin Interviews.

In response to the first attempt, I received an email from Amazon telling me I would have to edit the review because it violated community guidelines, but with no specific information on what guidelines I might have violated.

The only thing I could imagine was my review’s mention of “Hitler.” I tried deleting that reference—along with the first three paragraphs of five—and in response received another email from Amazon:

One or more of your posts were found to be outside our guidelines. In order to help our customers make informed choices, we encourage them to review the product and contribute information about it. However, Community content that violate our guidelines or Conditions of Use will be removed. 

Please consider this a first warning. 

Before submitting your next post, please refer to our Customer Guidelines: 

http://business.amazon.com/abredir/gp/help/customer/display.html/ref=hp_508088_bid_1594471?nodeId=508088

Failure to comply with our policies may result in your account being banned from taking part in Community features. 

Thanks for your understanding in this matter.

The Customer Guidelines in question provide in relevant part:

You may post reviews, comments, photos, videos, and other content; send e-cards and other communications; and submit suggestions, ideas, comments, questions, or other information, so long as the content is not illegal, obscene, threatening, defamatory, invasive of privacy, infringing of intellectual property rights (including publicity rights), or otherwise injurious to third parties or objectionable, and does not consist of or contain software viruses, political campaigning, commercial solicitation, chain letters, mass mailings, or any form of "spam" or unsolicited commercial electronic messages. You may not use a false e-mail address, impersonate any person or entity, or otherwise mislead as to the origin of a card or other content.

The only possible applicable prohibition in that paragraph would seem to be “objectionable,” which of course could mean anything because after all, anything could be objectionable to someone.

In addition to posting many book reviews on Amazon over the years, I’ve also published most of my own books and short stories with Amazon Publishing, and have never had a problem like this. I could speculate about why there’s so much sensitivity to a positive review of a book that’s essentially a series of conversations with Russia’s president, but I’ll leave that to others. Instead, I’ll just post the review here and hope it’ll lead more people to read (or listen to, as I did) this outstanding book:

Is it “appeasement” to acknowledge that other nations have legitimate security interests? Is it wise to ignore those interests? America certainly has such interests—see for example The Monroe Doctrine. For what happens when great powers ignore each other’s security interests, see The Cuban Missile Crisis.

The entire western establishment wants the world to believe the war in Ukraine was forced on NATO because Putin, “unprovoked,” started it out of an insane desire to reconstitute the Soviet Union and the Warsaw Pact, to undermine the “Rules Based Order,” etc…

But before our rulers blow up the world in the service of the foregoing talking points, it might be worth hearing the actual words of the person we are relentlessly told is the New New Hitler.

What emerges from these conversations is an impressively knowledgable, thoughtful, seemingly rational and at times even wryly funny leader. Maybe it’s all an act; maybe Putin’s articulated worldview is pure BS. But why let the New York Times and the White House filter your information when you can listen to the source itself?

Sun Tzu said “Know the enemy and know yourself, and you can fight a hundred battles with no danger of defeat.” If (as we are relentlessly told) Russia really is America’s enemy, shouldn’t we get to know Russia a little better than the comic-book caricature peddled by establishment media? Such an opportunity is right here in this excellent book.