The Russians are Coming!
Photo by Tom Hilton | CC BY 2.0
These days we see a seemingly odd project taking place in the realms of American liberalism: ferocious insistence that the truly outrageous Donald J. Trump is at his worst when….making peace with our enemies! Has he been brainwashed by Russian and/or North Korean agents, perhaps? Or is this all, perhaps, a crude plan to place Trump Steaks in Trump hotels in heretofore unbidden locations? What kind of madness would lessen the threat of American nukes that keeps us all as safe as we may reasonably hope to be?
The story is old, so old that we need to be reminded of an insight offered myself and others in the lecture classes of historian of empire William Appleman WIlliams, more than fifty yeas ago. As he explained, US policy toward Russia was already, in the nineteenth century approximately what it became after the Russian Revolution. Indeed, as nearly every imperial policy going back thousands of years: chop away at competing empires as persistently as possible, rouse internal divisions while threatening domestic populations into submissions with dark warnings about the evil nature of the competitor-empire peoples.
All this acquired a distinctly modern affect with the rise of the Bolsheviks, of course. The American newspaper headlines of 1919, announcing that in the new Russia, women had been “nationalized,” fairly typified the looniness of the orchestrated response, or alternatively, placed Russia among the barbarian non-white races threatening the West and, almost certainly, its fragile womanhood.
In their new book, The Russians Are Coming. Again: the first cold war as tragedy, the second as farce, Jeremy Kuzamarov and John Marciano, scholar-activists of human rights campaigns for decades, offer details reminding us of how hard American leaders struggled to put across the propaganda, but also how determined they have remained to keep as much of their own aims of conquest as secret as possible.
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