OMNI
SOVIET/RUSSOPHOBIA ANTHOLOGY #1,
February 2, 2023.
COLLECTED BY DICK BENNETT FOR A CULTURE OF PEACE,
JUSTICE, AND ECOLOGY
HTTPS://omnicenter.org/donate/
The
history of US anticommunism has been voluminously reported; the following selection has been randomly
collected.
CONTENTS
Books
(I have ask UAF’s Mullins Library to order them)
Dominic
Basulto. Russophobia : How Western Media Turns Russia Into the
Enemy. 2015.
Dan Kovalik. The Plot to Scapegoat Russia: How the CIA and the Deep State Have
Conspired to Vilify Putin. 2017.
Guy Mettan. From the Great Religious Schism to Anti-Putin
Hysteria. 2017.
Articles
Anti-Russian
sentiment. Wikipedia
Russia
Hating. The Nation.
Biden Administration’s
National Security Strategy. The
Editors. Monthly Review.
Anne Braden. Commie Witch-Hunting.
John Walsh. Post-Cold War Assaul
Jeffrey Sachs:
“Dangerous” U.S. Policy & “West’s False Narrative”
Gilbert Doctorow. “Dehumanizing the enemy.”
Jeremy Kuzmarov. “Outrageous Brainwashing Event…Deliberately
Falsifies History to Inflame American Hatred Against Russia and China.”
Ray McGovern. “Brainwashed for War with Russia.”
Margaret
Flowers, “Anti-Russian
Hysteria.”
Richard S. Dunn. “Old Russian
Bogeyman”
Even Reif. Better Nazi Murderers than Communists.
BOOKS
I grew up between the first Red Scare of 1917 and the Cold
War, a story told entertainingly with short texts and many photos in “Better Dead Than Red.” The following 3 books bring that history
up to the present and are on order at UAF’s Mullins Library.--Dick
Dominic
Basulto. Russophobia : How Western Media Turns Russia Into the
Enemy. 2015.
Dan Kovalik. The Plot to Scapegoat Russia: How the CIA and the Deep State Have
Conspired to Vilify Putin. 2017.
Guy Mettan. From the Great Religious Schism to Anti-Putin
Hysteria. Atlanta, GA : Clarity Press, 2017.
Dominic Basulto. Russophobia : How Western Media Turns Russia
Into the Enemy. 2015. 286. 3 reviews
The current Russophobia in the
Western media should not come as a big surprise. During the Cold War era, the
stereotype of dour, unsmiling Russians victimized by a ruthless, authoritarian
regime that posed an existential nuclear threat to the West became a mainstay
of the media narrative. Even after the end of the Cold War, Russophobia
continued to influence the way the West viewed Russia. This book attempts to
understand how Russophobia within the Western media during the Putin era
(2000-2015) led to a new Cold War between Russia and the West that includes
elements of information, cyber and economic warfare. Russophobia attempts to
answer the following questions: Why are any attempts by Russia to change the
Western media narrative immediately derided as propaganda? What do Western
policymakers get wrong about the Kremlin's motives? And, most importantly: Is
there a cure for Russophobia?
Publisher:The Druzhba
Project, [The United States of America], 2015
Duke University
Library; Perkins Library
Dominic Basulto is
the U.S. Executive Editor of Russia Direct. He has written extensively on
Russian foreign policy and holds an undergraduate degree from Princeton and an
MBA from Yale. More
by author
Russia Direct Guidebook to Russian Foreign Policy
By Alexey Dolinskiy ,
Alexei Pilko, George Joffé, Mark Katz , Alexander Sharavin, and more.
The Russia Direct Guidebook to Russian Foreign
Policy, including work by prominent international experts, looks back at
some of the defining moments in Moscow’s relations with the world over
the ...
Dan
Kovalik.
The Plot to Scapegoat Russia: How the CIA and the Deep State Have Conspired to
Vilify Putin. Introduction by David Talbot. Skyhorse, 2017.
Publisher’s
Description
An in-depth look at the decades-long effort to
escalate hostilities with Russia and what it portends for the future.
Since 1945, the US has justified numerous wars, interventions, and military
build-ups based on the pretext of the Russian Red Menace, even after the Soviet
Union collapsed at the end of 1991 and Russia stopped being Red. In fact, the
two biggest post-war American conflicts, the Korean and Vietnam wars, were not,
as has been frequently claimed, about stopping Soviet aggression or even
influence, but about maintaining old colonial relationships. Similarly, many
lesser interventions and conflicts, such as those in Latin America, were also
based upon an alleged Soviet threat, which was greatly overblown or
nonexistent. And now the specter of a Russian Menace has been raised again in
the wake of Donald Trump’s election.
The Plot to Scapegoat Russia examines
the recent proliferation of stories, usually sourced from American state
actors, blaming and manipulating the threat of Russia, and the long history of
which this episode is but the latest chapter. It will show readers two key
things: (1) the ways in which the United States has needlessly provoked Russia, especially after the
collapse of the USSR, thereby squandering hopes for peace and cooperation; and
(2) how Americans have lost out from this missed opportunity, and from decades
of conflicts based upon false premises. These revelations, amongst other,
make The Plot to Scapegoat
Russia one of the timeliest reads of 2017.
Guy Mettan. From the Great Religious Schism to
Anti-Putin Hysteria. Atlanta, GA : Clarity
Press, 2017. 390.
Articles
Anti-Russian sentiment - Wikipedia
https://en.wikipedia.org ›
wiki › Anti-Russian_sentiment
Anti-Russian sentiment, commonly referred to as Russophobia, is dislike or fear of Russia, the Russians, Russian culture, or Russian policy.
History · 2022 Russian invasion of... · By country · Within Russia
Russia Hating: A Study of the News—and Views—We
Find Fit ...
https://www.thenation.com ›
Article
Oct 31,
2022 — This Russia hovers between barbarism and modernity, between Asia and
Europe, an uncertain profile that has long troubled the Western mind.
But ...
“Notes from the Editors. ” Monthly Review. December 2022 (Volume 74, Number 7). buy this issue
This month’s “Notes from the Editors” takes on
the Biden Administration’s recently released National Security Strategy,
a bellicose document that rattles sabers towards the supposed autocracies of
Russia and China while reviving the age-old lie of the United States as
protector of democracy. | more…
|
The Witch-Hunting Committees: Never Again! US drive for global
hegemony 1990s JOHN V. WALSH. The First US Onslaught to
“Weaken” Post-Cold War Russia.
JANUARY
9, 2023. FacebookTwitterRedditEmail
[Sent to me by Sonny San Juan 1-9-23). Even Before NATO
Expansion, the West Sought to Strangle Russia Economically. The first post-cold
war assault on Russia by the West began in the early 1990s well before the
expansion of NATO. It took the form of a U.S.-induced economic depression in
Russia that was deeper and more disastrous than the Great Depression that
devastated the U.S. in the 1930s. And it came at a time when Russians were
naively talking of a “Common European Home” and a common European security
structure that would include Russia. The Disastrous
Russian Depression Resulting from Western supervised “Shock Therapy.” The magnitude of
this economic catastrophe was spelled out tersely in a recent essay by Paul Krugman who wondered whether
many Americans are aware of the enormous disaster it was for Russia. Krugman
is quite accurate in describing it – but not in identifying its cause. The graph below shows what happened to Russia
beginning in the early 1990s as a result of the economic policies that were
put in place under the guidance of U.S. advisors, the economist Jeffrey
Sachs, perhaps the foremost among them. Sachs describes his
contribution here. These policies drive an economy abruptly
from a centrally planned economy with price controls to an economy where
prices are determined by the market. This process is often described as
“shock therapy.” The plot shown above
is from the World Bank (The link is here.) in accord with the standards set by the World Bank under the policies of Creative Commons. The plot shows that,
upon the onset of “shock therapy” in 1991, the economy of Russia crumbled to
57% of its level in 1989, a decline of 43%! By comparison the U.S. economy in
the Great Depression of the 1930s fell to 70% of its pre-Depression level, a decline of 30%. The life
expectancy dropped by roughly 4 years in Russia during that period. Poverty
and hopelessness became the norm. From my experience, few Americans know of
this, and fewer still understand its magnitude. “Shock Therapy”
Applied to Poland Did Not Result in Prolonged Depression. Why? The data for Poland
are also shown for comparison in the chart above. Why? Because “shock
therapy” was also carried out in Poland beginning two years earlier than
Russia, in 1989. A glance at the graph above shows the striking difference
between the two and the graph below reinforces that view. Below the real
GDP’s for both Russia and Poland normalized to a value of 100 for the first
year of their transitions to a market economy are shown in a 2001 IMF staff
paper by Gerard Roland, “Ten Years After…Transition and Economics.” (China is also included by Roland. One
lesson is that China moved to a market economy without “shock therapy,” did
so with astonishing success and without putting itself at the mercy of the
largesse of the U.S.) Roland, Gérard. “Ten Years after … Transition and Economics.” IMF Staff Papers 48 (2001):
29–52. Cited by Krugman here. It is immediately
clear that Poland went through a brief downturn lasting two years but
recovered quickly, unlike Russia which continued in a slump for 16 years. Why
the difference between the two? A big part of the answer is provided by
economist Jeffrey Sachs who was in the forefront of advisors for the
transitions in both countries and hence is a man who knows whereof he speaks.
As Sachs put it in an interview here on DemocracyNow!, he was present during a “controlled
experiment” where he could observe what led to such different outcomes.
He says: “I had a controlled
experiment, because I was economic adviser both to Poland and to the Soviet
Union in the last year of President Gorbachev and to President Yeltsin in the
first two years of Russian independence, 1992, ’93. My job was finance, to
actually help Russia find a way to address, as you (the interviewer, Juan
Gonzalez) described it, a massive financial crisis. And my basic
recommendation in Poland, and then in Soviet Union and in Russia, was: To avoid
a societal crisis and a geopolitical crisis, the rich Western world should
help to tamp down this extraordinary financial crisis that was taking place
with the breakdown of the former Soviet Union. “Well,
interestingly, in the case of Poland, I made a series of very specific
recommendations, and they were all accepted by the U.S. government
— creating a stabilization fund, canceling part of Poland’s debts,
allowing many financial maneuvers to get Poland out of the difficulty. And,
you know, I patted myself on the back. ‘Oh, look at this!’ “I make a
recommendation, and one of them, for a billion dollars, stabilization fund,
was accepted within eight hours by the White House. So, I thought, ‘Pretty
good.’ “Then came the
analogous appeal on behalf of, first, Gorbachev, in the final days, and then
President Yeltsin. Everything I recommended, which was on the same basis of
economic dynamics, was rejected flat out by the White House. I didn’t
understand it, I have to tell you, at the time. I said, ‘But it worked in
Poland.’ And they’d stare at me blankly. In fact, an acting secretary of
state in 1992 said, ‘Professor Sachs, it doesn’t even matter whether I agree
with you or not. It’s not going to happen.’ “And it took me,
actually, quite a while to understand the underlying geopolitics. Those were
exactly the days of Cheney and Wolfowitz and Rumsfeld and what became the
Project for the New American Century, meaning for the continuation of
American hegemony. I didn’t see it at the moment, because I was thinking as an
economist, how to help overcome a financial crisis. But the unipolar politics
was taking shape, and it was devastating. Of course, it left Russia in a
massive financial crisis that led to a lot of instability that had its own
implications for years to come. “But even more than
that, what these people were planning, early on, despite explicit promises to
Gorbachev and Yeltsin, was the expansion of NATO. And Clinton started
the expansion of NATO with the three countries of Central Europe —
Poland, Hungary and Czech Republic — and then George W. Bush Jr. added
seven countries — Bulgaria, Romania, Slovakia, Slovenia and the three Baltic
states — but right up against Russia. …..” The Neocons at Work,
Carrying Out “The Wolfowitz Doctrine,” the Latest Expression of the Post-WWII
U.S. Drive For Total Global Domination. It is quite clear
that the goal of the United States was not to help Russia but to bring it
down, and Sachs correctly links that to the US quest for global
hegemony first set forth in the months before Pearl
Harbor and reiterated by the neocons who are now its champions. Among them
Sachs mentions Paul Wolfowitz whose “doctrine” sums up the goals of the
post-Soviet era with the words: “Our first
objective is to prevent the re-emergence of a new rival, either on
the territory of the former Soviet Union or elsewhere, that poses a threat on
the order of that posed formerly by the Soviet Union. This is a dominant
consideration underlying the new regional defense strategy and requires that
we endeavor to prevent any hostile power from dominating a region whose
resources would, under consolidated control, be sufficient to generate global
power.” “We must maintain
the mechanism for deterring potential competitors from even aspiring to a
larger regional or global role.” What better way to
achieve this goal than to reduce the economy of Russia to a basket case?
Sachs draws a direct line from the Great Russian Depression of the 1990’s and
early 2000’s to the expansion of NATO, the U.S. backed coup of a duly elected
President in Ukraine in 2014 and on to the U.S. proxy war in Ukraine, also
designed to “weaken” Russia. The hand of the US was at work every step of the
way. NYT’s Krugman Fails
to Discuss the Hand of the US in the Great Russian Depression [Message clipped] View entire message Attachments area Preview
YouTeffrey
Sachs: U.S. Policy &Jeffrey Sachs: “Dangerous” U.S. Policy & “West’s
False Narrative” Democracy
Now! discusses Western
hegemony and U.S. policy in Russia, Ukraine and China with Columbia
University economist Jeffrey Sachs, whose new article is headlined “The
West’s False Narrative About Russia and China.” Sachs says the bipartisan
U.S. approach to foreign policy is “unaccountably dangerous and wrongheaded,”
and warns the U.S. is creating “a recipe for yet another war” in East Asia. https://www.democracynow.org/2022/8/30/wests_false_narrative_china_russia_ukraine?jwsource=cl e
Narrative" Stoking Tensions with Russia, China |
Gilbert Doctorow. “Dehumanizing the enemy.”
Mronline.org (12-30-22).
The word “Russophobia” has been used very widely in the
past couple of years by Russians and by “friends of Russia” abroad to describe
the campaign of vilification of President Putin in particular and of the
Russian people more generally that the U.S. led West has practiced with rising
volume and shrillness ever since the start of an Information War launched in
2007.
Jeremy Kuzmarov. Outrageous
Brainwashing Event—Sponsored By Bush Institute and CIA-Backed National
Endowment for Democracy (NED)—Deliberately Falsifies History to Inflame
American Hatred Against Russia and China. CovertAction
Magazine. Nov 22, 2022.
Head
of International Republican Institute Dan Twining ridiculously compares
Putin-Xi meeting to Ribbentrop-Molotov Pact between Hitler and Stalin, while
former Under Secretary of State for Global Affairs accuses Russia of igniting
protests in Chile
Russia-bashing was in full vogue at a conference at the George W. Bush
Institute in Dallas
co-hosted by the National Endowment for Democracy (NED) on November 16, whose
purpose was to mobilize public support for the war in Ukraine.
During the first panel, Dan Twining of the International
Republican Institute, which supports right-wing parties worldwide, outrageously
compared a February 2022 summit between Russian President Vladimir Putin and
Chinese Premier Xi Xinping to the Ribbentrop-Molotov Pact between the Nazis and
Soviet Union during World War II.
The chair of the panel, Paula Dobriansky, Under Secretary of State for Global Affairs
from 2001 to 2009 and the daughter of an ally of Nazi collaborator Stepan
Bandera,[1] blamed Russia for igniting popular protests in Chile
through the spread of disinformation on social media.
President George W. Bush continued the Russia-bashing in his
keynote address in which he called Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky a
“tough guy” whom history “will judge as a remarkable leader.”
Bush went on to suggest that there is “an isolationist tendency
in the U.S.” which, if it ever prevailed, would “make the world far more
dangerous,” as U.S. leadership was “vital for collective action against
autocracy around the world.”
Bush said that “the George W. Bush Institute were [sic] big
believers in Ukrainian freedom,” and wanted to help the “young democracy” from
being “bullied by its neighbor, an autocrat.”
This was crucial to U.S. national security because “what will
Europe look like if Vladimir Putin conquers Ukraine? Next would be the
Baltics.” […]
Ray
McGovern.
“Brainwashed for War with Russia.” Antiwar.com on September 22, 2022 (more
by Antiwar.com) (Posted Sep
26, 2022).
WarEurope, Russia, UkraineNewsRussia-Ukraine
War
Thanks to
Establishment media, the sorcerer apprentices advising President Joe Biden—I
refer to Secretary of State Antony Blinken, national security adviser Jacob
Sullivan, and China specialist Kurt Campbell—will have no trouble rallying
Americans for the widest war in 77 years, starting in Ukraine, and maybe
spreading to China. And, shockingly, under false pretenses.
Most Americans are oblivious to the reality
that Western media are owned and operated by the same corporations that make
massive profits by helping to stoke small wars and then peddling the necessary
weapons. Corporate leaders, and
Ivy-mantled elites, educated to believe in U.S. “exceptionalism,” find the
lucre and the luster too lucrative to be able to think straight. They deceive
themselves into thinking that (a) the U.S. cannot lose a war; (b) escalation
can be calibrated and wider war can be limited to Europe; and (c) China can be
expected to just sit on the sidelines. The attitude, consciously or
unconsciously,
Not to worry. And, in
any case, the lucre and luster are worth the risk.
The media also know they can always trot out died-in-the-wool
Russophobes to “explain,” for example, why the Russians are “almost genetically
driven” to do evil (James Clapper, former National Intelligence Director and
now hired savant on CNN); or Fiona Hill (former National Intelligence Officer
for Russia), who insists “Putin wants to evict the United States from Europe … As
he might put it:
Goodbye, America.
Don’t let the door hit you on the way out.
Absent a miraculous appearance of clearer heads with a less
benighted attitude toward the core interests of Russia in Ukraine, and China in
Taiwan, historians who survive to record the war now on our doorstep will
describe it as the result of hubris and stupidity run amok. Objective
historians may even note that one of their colleagues—Professor John Mearsheimer—got it right from the start, when he explained in the autumn 2014 issue of Foreign Affairs “Why the Ukraine Crisis is the West’s Fault.”
Historian Barbara
Tuchman addressed the kind of situation the world faces in Ukraine in her book
“The March of Folly: From Troy to Vietnam.” (Had she lived, she surely would
have updated it to take Iraq, Afghanistan, Syria, and Ukraine into account).
Tuchman wrote:
Wooden-headedness…
plays a remarkably large role in government. It consists in assessing a
situation in terms of preconceived fixed notions while ignoring or rejecting
any contrary signs. It is acting according to wish while not allowing oneself
to be deflected by the facts.
Six Years (and
Counting) of Brainwashing
Thanks to U.S. media,
a very small percentage of Americans know that:
·
·
14 years ago, then
U.S. Ambassador to Russia (current CIA Director) William Burns was warned by
Russian Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov that Russia might have to intervene in
Ukraine, if it were made a member of NATO. The Subject Line of
Burns’s Feb. 1, 2008 Embassy Moscow cable (#182) to Washington makes it clear that Amb. Burns did
not mince Lavrov’s words; the subject line stated: “Nyet means nyet:
Russia’s NATO enlargement redlines.” Thus, Washington policymakers
were given forewarning, in very specific terms, of Russia’s redline regarding
membership for Ukraine in NATO. Nevertheless, on April 3, 2008, a NATO summit
in Bucharest asserted: “NATO welcomes Ukraine’s and Georgia’s Euro-Atlantic
aspirations for membership in NATO. We agreed today that these countries will
become members of NATO.”
·
8 years ago, on Feb.
22, 2014, the U.S. orchestrated a coup in Kiev—rightly labeled “the most blatant coup in
history’, insofar as it had already been blown on YouTube 18 days prior.
Kiev’s spanking new leaders, handpicked and identified by name by U.S.
Assistant Secretary of State Victoria Nuland in the YouTube-publicized
conversation with the U.S. ambassador in Kiev, immediately called for Ukraine
to join NATO.
·
6 years ago, in June
2016, Russian President Vladimir Putin told Western reporters of his concern
that so-called antiballistic missiles sites in Romania and Poland could be
converted overnight to accommodate offensive strike missiles posing a threat to
Russia’s own nuclear forces. (See this unique video, with English subtitles, from minute 37 to 49.) There is a
direct analogy with the 1962 Cuban missile crisis when Moscow put offensive
strike missiles in Cuba and President John Kennedy reacted strongly to the
existential threat that posed to the U.S.
·
On December 21, 2021,
President Putin told his
most senior military leaders:“It is extremely alarming that elements of the
U.S. global defense system are being deployed near Russia. The Mk 41 launchers,
which are located in Romania and are to be deployed in Poland, are adapted for
launching the Tomahawk strike missiles. If this infrastructure continues to
move forward, and if US and NATO missile systems are deployed in
Ukraine, their flight time to Moscow will be only 7—10 minutes, or even
five minutes for hypersonic systems. This is a huge challenge for us, for our
security.” [Emphasis added.]
·
On December 30, 2021,
Biden and Putin talked by phone at Putin’s urgent request. The Kremlin readout stated:
“Joseph Biden
emphasized that Russia and the U.S. shared a special responsibility for ensuring
stability in Europe and the whole world and that Washington had no
intention of deploying offensive strike weapons in Ukraine.” Yuri Ushakov,
a top foreign policy adviser to Putin, pointed out that this was also one of
the goals Moscow hoped to achieve with its proposals for security guarantees to
the U.S. and NATO. [Emphasis added.]
On February 12, 2022, Ushakov briefed the
media on the telephone conversation between Putin and Biden earlier that day.
The
call was as a follow-up of sorts to the… December 30 telephone conversation…
The Russian President made clear that President Biden’s proposals did not
really address the central, key elements of Russia’s initiatives either with regards
to non-expansion of NATO, or non-deployment of strike weapons systems
on Ukrainian territory … To these items, we have received no
meaningful response.” [Emphasis
added.]
·
On February 24, 2022,
Russia invaded Ukraine.
Unprovoked?
The U.S. insists that
Russia’s invasion was “unprovoked”. Establishment media dutifully regurgitate
that line, while keeping Americans in the dark about such facts (not
opinion) as are outlined (and sourced) above. Most Americans are just
as taken in by the media as they were 20 years ago, when they were told there
were weapons of mass destruction in Iraq. They simply took it on faith. Nor did
the guilty media express remorse—or a modicum of embarrassment.
The late Fred Hiatt,
who was op-ed editor at the Washington Post, is a case in point. In
an interview with the Columbia Journalism Review [CJR,
March/April 2004] he commented:
If you look at the
editorials we wrote running up [to the war], we state as flat fact that he
[Saddam Hussein] has weapons of mass destruction.
If that’s not true, it
would have been better not to say it.
(My journalism mentor,
Robert Parry, had this to say about Hiatt’s remark. “Yes, that is a common
principle of journalism, that if something isn’t real, we’re not supposed to
confidently declare that it is.”)
It’s worse now. Russia
is not Iraq. And Putin has been so demonized over the past six years that
people are inclined to believe the likes of James Clapper to the effect there’s
something genetic that makes Russians evil. “Russia-gate” was a big con (and,
now, demonstrably so), but Americans don’t know that either. The consequences
of prolonged demonization are extremely dangerous—and will become even more so
in the next several weeks as politicians vie to be the strongest in opposing
and countering Russia’s “unprovoked” attack on Ukraine.
Anti-Russian Hysteria Used By FBI
To Target Black Organizers
By Margaret Flowers, Clearing the FOG. Popular
Resistance.org (8-9-22). On July 29,
the FBI conducted a surprise raid on the homes and offices of leaders of the
African People's Socialist Party and Uhuru Solidarity Movement (APSP-Uhuru) in
Florida and Missouri under the pretext that they were co-conspirators in an
indictment of a Russian national, Alexander Ionov. In the raid, documents and
electronic devices were stolen. The raid was coordinated with the Biden
Administration. Clearing the FOG speaks with Chairman Omali Yeshitela of the
APSP - Uhuru about the raid and the broader implications of it for activists in
the United States. -more-
New Bill That Passed
House Reinvokes Old Russian Bogeyman as Pretext For More U.S. Intervention in
Africa
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10:58 AM (17 minutes ago) |
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Mronline.org (6-14-22).
After
the end of the Second World War, American intelligence immediately set about
the work of rehabilitating the world’s fascists to fight the new war on
Communism. |
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