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The Orchestration of Russiaphobia Is The Prelude To War

April 23, 2019

The Orchestration of Russiaphobia Is The Prelude To War

The Russian Embassy in Washington has prepared an accurate 121-page report, THE RUSSIAGATE HYSTERIA: A CASE OF SEVERE RUSSOPHOBIA. https://washington.mid.ru/upload/iblock/3c3/3c3d1e3b69a4c228e99bfaeb5491ecd7.pdf 

Everyone should read this report. It documents the fake news, lies, violations of diplomatic standards and international law, and gratuitous aggressive actions taken against Russia during the period beginning May 18, 2016 and continuing through the issuance of the Mueller Report. 

Without explicitly saying so, the report shows that neither the US government nor the American media has a nanoparticle of integrity. Both are criminal organizations that are willing to risk war with Russia in their pursuit of narrow policitized agendas.

This is important information for Americans and the rest of the world to have. Every person, every government and every private organization that supports Washington’s Russiaphobic policies is contributing to the growing threat of nuclear war. 

One hopes also that the entirety of the Russian government, media, and population also read the report as it has equally powerful messages for Russia. The messages are no doubt unintended, but they nevertheless emerge from the embassy’s report.

The Russian government should marvel at its naivete in trusting Washington, US institutions such as Citibank, and US adherence to international law. For 121 pages the report lists transgression against Russia followed by transgression and lie followed by lie; yet the Russian government continued to send diplomatic notes that are never answered, requests for meetings that are never answered, requests for evidence that are never answered. One would think that month after month of abuse would have caused the Russian government to wonder where was the intelligence, “cooperative spirit,” reason, and “common interest in global security” that Russia’s responses to Washington assumed were present in Russia’s “partner.”

 …click on the above link to read the rest of the article…

Respecting the Other

April 17, 2019

Respecting the Other

One of my old friends’ father was at one time something of a Cold Warrior: he did something or other for the US defense establishment—nuclear submarine-related, if I recall correctly. This work activity apparently led him to develop a particularly virulent form of Russophobia; not so much a phobia as a pronounced loathing of all things Russian. According to my friend, her father would compulsively talk about Russia in overly negative terms. He would also sneeze a lot (allergies, perhaps), and she said that it was often difficult for her to distinguish his sneezes from his use of the word “Russia” as an expletive. But perhaps she was trying to draw a distinction without a difference: her father was allergic to Russia, his allergy caused him to sneeze a lot and also to develop a touch of Tourette’s, thus his sneezes came out sounding like “Russia!”

What had caused him to develop such a jaundiced view of Russia? The reason is easy to guess: his work activity on behalf of the government forced him to focus closely on what his superiors labeled as “the Russian threat.” Unfolded a bit, it would no doubt turn out that what Russia threatened was Americans’ self-generated fiction of overwhelming military superiority. Unlike the United States, which had developed any number of plans to destroy the Soviet Union (of which nothing ever came due to said lack of overwhelming military superiority) the Soviet Union had never developed any such plans. And this was utterly infuriating to certain people in the US. Was this truly necessary, or was this an accident?

We could take into account geopolitical, military or economic considerations, consider the (no longer relevant) clash of socialist vs. capitalist ideologies or any number of other irrelevancies.

 …click on the above link to read the rest of the article…

The Orientalism of Western Russophobia

March 11, 2019

The Orientalism of Western Russophobia

An illustration from a Wall Street Journal article entitled “Russia’s Turn to its Asian Past” depicting Vladimir Putin as Genghis Khan.

Last year marked the 40th anniversary of the publication of Edward W. Said’s pioneering book, Orientalism, as well as fifteen years since the Palestinian-American intellectual’s passing. To bid farewell to such an important scholar shortly after the 2003 U.S. invasion of Iraq, which Said fiercely criticized until his dying breath before succumbing to leukemia, made an already tremendous loss that much more impactful.

His seminal text forever reoriented political discourse by painstakingly examining the overlooked cultural imperialism of colonial history in the West’s construction of the so-called Orient. Said meticulously interrogated the Other-ing of the non-Western world in the humanities, arts, and anthropology down to its minutiae. As a result, the West was forced to confront not just its economic and political plunder but the long-established cultural biases filtering the lens through which it viewed the East which shaped its dominion over it.

Said's Orientalism

His writings proved to be so influential that they laid the foundations for what is now known as post-colonial theory. This became an ironic category as the author himself would strongly reject any implication that the subjugation of developing countries is a thing of the past. How apropos that the Mandatory Palestine-born writer’s death came in the midst of the early stages of the ‘War on Terror’ that made clear Western imperialism is very much alive.

Despite its history of ethnic cleansing, slavery, and war, the United States had distinguished itself from Britain and France in that it had never established its own major colonies within the Middle East, Asia or North Africa in the heart of the Orient. According to Said, it was now undergoing this venture as the world’s sole remaining superpower following the end of the Cold War with the invasions of Afghanistan and Iraq.

 …click on the above link to read the rest of the article…

Russophobia and the Specter of War

December 19, 2018

Russophobia and the Specter of War


Could global warming pose the greatest threat to the future of life on the planet?  Quite possibly, if we believe the international (and scientific) consensus, despite a widening stratum of debunkers, deniers, and skeptics.  What about the prospects of thermonuclear war between the United States and Russia, two countries armed to the max and seemingly moving toward the brink of military conflict?  Where does that rate?   If the question is asked of most any Beltway denizen, the response might be something along lines of “sounds frightening, but right now we have other priorities, and we can’t lose sight of the Russian threat”.

As American political life continues to deteriorate, matters of war and peace rarely merit attention amidst the sound and fury of manufactured news, moral posturing, personal scandals, and tweeting exchanges.  Good for TV ratings and maybe partisan advantage, decidedly less so for addressing issues of political relevance.   Now we have two years of frenzied Russiagate and its attendant neo-McCarthyism.   That the intensifying hostility directed by one nuclear power toward another might bring the world closer to a war that could end all wars seems bizarrely remote to a political class obsessed with little beyond its own power and wealth, faintly camouflaged by identity politics; the “unthinkable” remains, well, unthinkable.

As anti-Russia hysteria spreads, speech taboos harden; any discourse at odds with tightening official political/media consensus brings immediate blowback, smear-mongering, and (where possible) silencing.   It is so obvious that Vladimir Putin is a ruthless, aggressive monster that any dissenting view must be the product of either insanity or Russian propaganda.

…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…

Assorted Thoughts On Politics, Humanity, And The World

December 12, 2018

Assorted Thoughts On Politics, Humanity, And The World

The problem isn’t just that we are ruled by tyrants, it’s that our minds are full of propaganda and cultural mind viruses which cause us to consent to it.

Russophobia and an uncritical emphasis on Trump has been used to scaremonger an annoyingly large percentage of American progressives from focusing on wanting change to focusing on wanting things to go back to how they used to be. Wanting things to go back to how they used to be is wanting the conditions which created Trump.

Patriotism is like the blue pill in The Matrix. You take it and you get to feel good about your country, but you don’t get to know the truth about it.

If everyone suddenly deeply understood on a gut level exactly how horrific war is, all military actions the US and its allies are currently engaged in would be forced to end due to popular revolt.

Under-discussed: secretive government agencies provide support to Silicon Valley corporations, support which they could easily have threatened to give to those corporations’ competitors instead if certain agreements weren’t made.

Anyone who says Russia is about to invade Ukraine or the Baltic states is either lying or ignorant. A nation with an economy the size of Spain which has been gutting its military budget is not gearing up for World War Three.

Russia’s military personality is a lot like the personality of the stereotypical Russian military veteran: stoic and reserved when left unprovoked, but willing and able to put you in a wheelchair if you invade his personal space. It should be treated accordingly.

People who don’t believe that these idiotic escalations against Russia can lead to nuclear war have simply compartmentalized away from fully considering all the possibilities. They have done this out of intellectual cowardice.

…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…

Letter From Britain: An Establishment Blinded By Russophobia

June 16, 2018

Letter From Britain: An Establishment Blinded By Russophobia

A British elite challenged by large parts of the British population is rallying around trumped-up fear of Russia as a means of protecting its interests, as Alexander Mercouris explains.

Hostility to Russia is one of the most enduring, as well as one of the most destructive, realities of British life. Its persistence is illustrated by one of the most interesting but least reported facts about the Skripal affair.

This is that Sergey Skripal, the Russian former GRU operative who was the main target of the recent Salisbury poisoning attack, was recruited by British intelligence and became a British spy in 1995, four years after the USSR collapsed, at a time when the Cold War was formally over.

In 1995 Boris Yeltsin was President of Russia, Communism was supposedly defeated, the once mighty Soviet military was no more, and a succession of pro-Western governments in Russia were attempting unsuccessfully to carry out IMF proposed ‘reforms’. In a sign of the new found friendship which supposedly existed between Britain and Russia the British Queen toured Moscow and St. Petersburg the year before.

Yet notwithstanding all the appearances of friendship, and despite the fact that Russia in 1995 posed no conceivable threat to Britain, it turns out that British intelligence was still up to its old game of recruiting Russian spies to spy on Russia.

Britain’s Long History of Russophobia

This has in fact been the constant pattern of Anglo-Russian relations ever since the Napoleonic Wars.

Brief periods of seeming friendship – often brought about by a challenge posed by a common enemy – alternating with much longer periods of often intense hostility.

This hostility – at least from the British side – is not easy to understand.

…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…

Confronting Russophobia

April 23, 2017

Confronting Russophobia

Confronting Russophobia

There is a paranoid, hysterical quality to the public discourse on Russia and all things Russian in today’s America.  The corporate media machine and its Deep State handlers have abdicated reason and common decency in favor of raw hate and fear-mongering.  We have not seen anything like it before, even in the darkest days of the Cold War.

The roots of Russophobia’s emotional appeal to the left seem clear: It comes as a huge mental relief to the ultrasensitive liberal mind to be able to hate an outside group with impunity, and even to appear virtuous in the process.  Of course, the object of that animus is a Christian and European nation that stubbornly refuses to be postmodernized, or become gripped by self-hate and morbid introspection; a nation not ashamed of its past and unwilling to surrender its future to alien multitudes; a nation where nobody obsesses over transgender bathrooms, microaggressions, and other “issues” indicative of a society’s moral and intellectual decrepitude.

The liberals’ ideological and emotional Russophobia has blended seamlessly with the bread-and-butter hostility to Russia shared by Deep State operatives in the intelligence and national-security apparatus, in the military-industrial complex, and in the congressional duopoly. The result is a surreal narrative that mixes supposedly unprovoked “Russian aggression” in Ukraine, hostile intent in the Baltics, serial war crimes in Syria, political destabilization in Western Europe, and gross interference in America’s “democratic process”. The result is an altogether fictitious “existential threat,” which has made President Trump’s intended détente with Moscow impossible.  He may have been serious about turning over a new leaf, but the Deep State counterpressure proved just too great.  A solid rejection front emerged, left and right, conservative and liberal, which extends even into his own team and finally inhibited him from making moves that could have appeared too friendly to Putin.

…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…

Revanchism and russophobia: the dark undercurrents of the war in the Ukraine

March 8, 2015

Revanchism and russophobia: the dark undercurrents of the war in the Ukraine

The situation in the Ukraine is more or less calm right now, and this might be the time to step back from the flow of daily reports and look at the deeper, underlying currents.  The question I want to raise today is one I will readily admit not having an answer to.  What I want to ask is this: could it be that one of the key factors motivating the West’s apparently illogical and self-defeating desire to constantly confront Russia is simply revanchism for WWII?

We are, of course, talking about perceptions here so it is hard to establish anything for sure, but I wonder if the Stalin’s victory against Hitler was really perceived as such by the western elites, or if it was perceived as a victory against somebody FDR could also have called “our son of a bitch“.  After all, there is plenty of evidence that both the US and the UK were key backers of Hitler’s rise to power (read Starikov about that) and that most (continental) Europeans were rather sympathetic to Herr Hitler.  Then, of course and as it often happens, Hitler turned against his masters or, at least, his supporters, and they had to fight against him.  But there is strictly nothing new about that.  This is also what happened with Saddam, Noriega, Gaddafi, al-Qaeda and so many other “bad guy” who began their careers as the AngloZionists’ “good guys”.  Is it that unreasonable to ask whether the western elites were truly happy when the USSR beat Nazi Germany, or if they were rather horrified by what Stalin had done to what was at that time the single most powerful western military – Germany’s?

A few days ago I saw this picture on Colonel Cassad’s blog:

Stalin and his commanders

 

Looking at that photo I thought that for the western elites, to see these men must have been rather frightening, especially considering that they must have known that their entire war effort was, at most, 20% of what it took to defeat Nazi Germany and that those who had shouldered 80%+ were of an ideology diametrically opposed to capitalism.

 

…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…

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