{"id":22955,"date":"2017-02-23T19:04:14","date_gmt":"2017-02-24T00:04:14","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/olduvai.ca\/?p=22955"},"modified":"2017-02-23T19:04:14","modified_gmt":"2017-02-24T00:04:14","slug":"the-increasingly-unhinged-russia-rhetoric-comes-from-a-long-standing-u-s-playbook","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/?p=22955","title":{"rendered":"The Increasingly Unhinged Russia Rhetoric Comes From a Long-Standing U.S. Playbook"},"content":{"rendered":"
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The Increasingly Unhinged Russia Rhetoric Comes From a Long-Standing U.S. Playbook\u00a0<\/a><\/h3>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n
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FOR ASPIRING JOURNALISTS,\u00a0historians, or politically engaged citizens, there are few more productive uses of one\u2019s time than randomly reading through\u00a0the newsletters of I.F. Stone<\/a>, the intrepid\u00a0and independent journalist of the Cold War era who became, in my view, the nation\u2019s first \u201cblogger\u201d even though he died before the advent of the internet. Frustrated by big media\u2019s oppressive corporatized environment and\u00a0its pro-government propaganda model<\/a>, and then ultimately blacklisted from mainstream media outlets for his objections to anti-Russia narratives, Stone created his own bi-monthly newsletter, sustained exclusively by subscriptions, and spent 18 years relentlessly debunking propaganda spewing from the U.S. government and its\u00a0media partners.<\/p>\n

What makes Stone\u2019s body of work\u00a0so valuable is not its illumination of\u00a0history\u00a0but rather its illumination of the present. What\u2019s most striking about his newsletters\u00a0is how little changes when it comes to U.S. government propaganda and militarism, and the role the U.S. media plays in sustaining it all. Indeed, reading through his reporting,\u00a0one gets the impression that U.S. politics just endlessly replays the same debates, conflicts, and tactics.<\/p>\n

Much of Stone\u2019s writings, particularly throughout the 1950s and into the 1960s, focused on the techniques for keeping Americans in a high state of fear over the Kremlin. One passage,\u00a0from August 1954<\/a>, particularly resonates; Stone explained why it\u2019s impossible to stop McCarthyism at home when \u2014 for purposes of sustaining U.S. war and militarism \u2014 Kremlin leaders are constantly being depicted as gravely threatening and even omnipotent. Other than the change in Moscow\u2019s ideology \u2014 a change many of\u00a0today\u2019s most toxic McCarthyites explicitly deny<\/a>\u00a0\u2014 Stone\u2019s observations could be written with equal accuracy today.<\/p>\n

…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

The Increasingly Unhinged Russia Rhetoric Comes From a Long-Standing U.S. Playbook\u00a0 FOR ASPIRING JOURNALISTS,\u00a0historians, or politically engaged citizens, there are few more productive uses of one\u2019s time than randomly reading through\u00a0the newsletters of I.F. Stone, the intrepid\u00a0and independent journalist of the Cold War era who became, in my view, the nation\u2019s first \u201cblogger\u201d even though […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_monsterinsights_skip_tracking":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_active":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_note":"","_monsterinsights_sitenote_category":0,"footnotes":""},"categories":[5],"tags":[149,5437,4908,471,7970,524,542,655,694,5567,827,865,877],"class_list":["post-22955","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-geopolitics","tag-cold-war","tag-glenn-greenwald","tag-i-f-stone","tag-kremlin","tag-mccarthyism","tag-militarism","tag-moscow","tag-propaganda","tag-russia","tag-the-intercept","tag-united-states","tag-washington","tag-white-house"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/22955","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=22955"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/22955\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":22956,"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/22955\/revisions\/22956"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=22955"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=22955"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=22955"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}