OMNI
RUSSIA NEWSLETTER #8, 11-10-21
Compiled by Dick Bennett for a Culture of Peace, Justice, and Ecology.
(#1 March 21, 2014; #2 April 10, 2014; #3 May 16, 2014; #4 July 22, 2014; #5 March 10, 2015; #6 Sept. 1, 2016; #7, October 3, 2017)
CONTENTS: RUSSIA NEWSLETTER #8
NEW COLD WAR AND RUSSOPHOBIA
2021 Russiagate
Tomlinson and Paulson
2018 Transcend Media Service
Muzzafar, “The Geopolitics of Targeting Russia”
Petras, “UK, the EU, and the US Gangs Up on Russia”
Klare, “The New Cold War”
Marcetic, US and Russia: Fake News
Kuzmarov and Marciano (book), The Russians Are Coming Again
2017
Kuzmarov and Marciano (essay), “The Russians Are Coming, Again”
ADG Reports US Sends Troops to Russian Border, google search
Oliver Stone DVD, Ukraine on Fire
Cohen, Democrats Repudiate FDR’s Detente
TEXTS
PERSPECTIVES
2021
New Cold War, Russiagate lies & Rachel Maddow 11-9-21
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Hi Abel, Dick and Art,
I hope you are all well.
I’m sorry I wasn’t in on the Russiagate conversation between Abel and Dick. I actually read Aarron Mate’s article yesterday, so Abel and I are on the same page, as it were!
My thoughts: Abel is absolutely correct in his assessment. Besides Aaron Mate, Glenn Greenwald and Matt Taibbi and a handful of others have written critically about Russiagate (not surprisingly, all have been effectively “cancelled” 100% by all Blue State legacy media).
Russiagate, at its core, was an attempt by the Democratic establishment to explain away Hillary Clinton’s humiliating 2016 loss to an openly corrupt, vulgar, buffoonish, politically inexperienced game show host, despite outspending him two to one. 2016 should have been the mother of all come to Jesus moments for Democrats, but, instead of coming to terms with the legacy of 30 years of aggressively pushing neoliberalism, they came up with the laughably transparent excuse that Trump essentially parachuted in to DC from a Russian plane piloted by Putin. Russiagate, from the get go never passed the smell test, but the entire Democrat establishment, the entire Democrat party leadership, the entirety of Blue State legacy media such as CNN, MSNBC (the worst offender), the New York Times, the Washington Post, and NPR all went all in on this pathetic joke. Furthermore, the majority of Democrats bought this pathetic joke. Probably close to 100% of the self-styled “Hashtag Resistance”—especially well-off, upper middle class women who personally identified with Hillary’s “journey”, were the worst, not simply drinking the Russiagate kool-aid, but guzzling it. Time and time again, evidence free assertions based on anonymous claims (usually from our intel services) about Trump and Russia were put forward as fact.
As conspiracy theories go, Russiagate is certainly stupid, but stupidity is hardly the worst of it. Belief in it—approaching an almost religious level by members of Hillary Clinton’s fan club—prevented the Democrats from coming to terms with how Trump ended up in the Oval Office. No coming to terms with NAFTA, with Wall Street-friendly policies such as deregulation that even Reagan himself couldn’t have imagined, with massive outsourcing of manufacturing jobs, with mass incarceration of mostly black and brown people, with unchecked militarism, etc., No, rather than take a good look in the mirror, Democrats preferred the comforting narrative that the Orange Monster was an aberration, and reached the White House via a coup concocted in Moscow. Think of what Russiagaters believed: that Trump conspired with the Kremlin to win in 2016, that the Kremlin had blackmail on him (the pee tape), that, essentially, he was a traitor, doing the bidding of a hostile foreign power. Think of that. Forget that Trump is odious and that you hate him. The president is a traitor. People like Rachel Maddow rooted for this to be true. And she wasn’t alone. That’s how badly Trump’s election broke the brains of most Democrats.
For Progressives, Russiagate was a disaster, and not simply because it prevented the party from coming to terms with the legacy of its terrible economic policies, but because, predictably, the Democratic establishment began smearing Bernie Sanders with the Russia brush when it looked like he had a real shot at the nomination in 2020. I believe it was the Washington Post that on the eve of Super Tuesday claimed that Bernie was the Kremlin’s preferred candidate. And Bernie wasn’t alone. Anyone on the left risked being smeared in this way. Wow. Think about that. I’d like to think that most Democrats resorted to this truly disgusting Neo-McCarthyism because Trump so broke their brains, and not because they are so utterly ignorant of the history and legacy of Joe McCarthy.
Finally, for those of us who care about issues of war and peace, including nuclear war, Russiagate—and the very worst offender promoting it was Rachel Maddow—Russiagate was probably the most reckless, irresponsible thing I have ever seen in American politics. Following the collapse of the USSR, the US expanded NATO right up to Russia’s borders, borders which invading armies from the West have crossed numerous times (the Russians are aware of their history, unlike the vast majority of Americans (who seem to think that Tom Hanks won WWII after he saved Private Ryan). Unlike the US Empire, which has 800 plus bases spread around the planet, the Russian military is almost entirely concentrated within Russia itself. Any future war with the American Empire and its NATO vassals will probably be fought on its borders, and they have been planning accordingly. Think about it. A modern well-equipped military. Short supply lines. Defending their country again for the umpteenth time against invaders from the West. It is not impossible to imagine an accident, an incident along Russia’s border with NATO escalating into shooting. In a conventional war, Russia might very well prevail, and quickly. And the US would take real military casualties for the first time since WWII. For the first time since WWII, the US would be facing a modern, well-equipped military, not third world insurgents. Can you imagine the reaction back home if we stumbled into a shooting war on Russia’s border and lost? Can you imagine if that had happened under Trump? Trump, an insecure ego maniac? After years of Russiagting him, saying that he was Putin’s puppet, that he was controlled by the Kremlin? The pressure to resort to “tactical”nuclear weapons would probably be irresistible. Need I say more?
Final thoughts on Russiagate. It’s not going away, although the damage it has done, including a loss of even more trust in the media, is irreparable. Special prosecutor John Durham is slowly investigating it, and, I predict, the results will not be pretty for Democrats or their courtiers in the media, like Rachel Maddow.
And my favorite Russiagate nonsense? That would have to be an article published in the Washington Post, mere days after the 2016 election, which listed a large number of alternative media organizations—most of them on the left, predictably—that supposedly were doing the bidding of the Kremlin. Included among them was our very favorite vegan website, Nutritioinfacts.org! Yes, that’s’ correct, the paper whose motto is “Democracy Dies in Darkness” suggested in an article that a vegan website was spreading Russian propaganda! The founder of the site attributed it to his promotion of Russian Kale. And there you have it.
Peace (and Good help us, and I’m not religious),
George
2018
The Anti-Empire Report #157
By William Blum – Published April 18th, 2018
https://williamblum.org/aer/read/157
Unpersons
One reason it’s so easy to get an American administration, the mainstream media, and the American people to jump on an anti-Russian bandwagon is of course the legacy of the Soviet Union. To all the real crimes and shortcomings of that period the US regularly added many fictitious claims to agitate the American public against Moscow. That has not come to a halt. During a debate in the 2016 Republican presidential primary, candidate Ben Carson (now the head of the US Housing and Urban Development agency) allowed the following to pass his lips: “Joseph Stalin said if you want to bring America down, you have to undermine three things: Our spiritual life, our patriotism, and our morality.” This is a variation on many Stalinist “quotes” over the years designed to deprecate both the Soviet leader and any American who can be made to sound like him. The quote was quite false, but the debate moderators and the other candidates didn’t raise any question about its accuracy. Of course not.
Another feature of Stalinism that was routinely hammered into our heads was that of the “non-person” or “unperson” – the former well-known official or writer, for example, who fell out of favor with the Stalinist regime for something he said or did, and was thereafter doomed to a life of obscurity, if not worse. In his classic 1984 George Orwell speaks of a character who “was already an unperson. He did not exist: he had never existed.” I was reminded of this by the recent sudden firing of Rex Tillerson as Secretary of State. Matthew Lee, the courageous Associated Press reporter who has been challenging State Department propaganda for years, had this to say in an April 1 article:
Rex Tillerson has all but vanished from the State Department’s website as his unceremonious firing by tweet took effect over the weekend.
The “Secretary of State Tillerson” link at the top of the department’s homepage disappeared overnight Saturday and was replaced with a generic “Secretary of State” tab. When clicked, it leads to a page that informs visitors in a brief statement that Deputy Secretary of State John Sullivan “became acting Secretary of State on April 1, 2018.” It shows a photo of Sullivan signing his appointment papers as deputy in June 2017 but offers no explanation for the change in leadership.
In addition to that change, links that had connected to Tillerson’s speeches, travels and other events now display those of Sullivan. The link to Tillerson’s biography as the 69th secretary of state briefly returned a “We’re sorry, that page can’t be found” message. After being notified of the message, the State Department restored the link and an archive page for Tillerson’s tenure was enabled.
The most repeated Cold War anti-Communist myth was of course Nikita Khrushchev’s much quoted – No, eternally quoted! – line: “We will bury you.” On November 20 1956 the New York Times had reported: “In commenting on coexistence last night Mr. Khrushchev said communism did not have to resort to war to defeat capitalism. “Whether you like it or not, history is on our side,” he said. “We will bury you.”
Obviously, it was not a military threat of any kind. But tell that to the countless individuals who have cited it as such forever. So, as matters turned out, did communism, or call it socialism, bury capitalism? No. But not for the reason the capitalists would like to think – their superior socio-economic system. Capitalism remains the world’s pre-eminent system primarily because of military power combined with CIA covert actions. It’s that combination that irredeemably crippled socialist forces in Vietnam, Cambodia, Laos, Philippines, Guatemala, Haiti, Ecuador, the Congo, Brazil, Dominican Republic, Chile, Angola, Grenada, Nicaragua, Bulgaria, Albania, Afghanistan, Yugoslavia, El Salvador, etc., etc., etc.
We’ll never know what kind of societies would have resulted if these movements had been allowed to develop without US interference; which of course was the idea behind the interference. MORE https://williamblum.org/aer/read/157
TRANSCEND MEDIA SERVICE: Solutions-Oriented Peace Journalism
Week 13 // 26 Mar - 01 Apr 2018
The Geopolitics of Targeting Russia
Chandra Muzaffar
The aim is clear. It is to compel Moscow to submit to the hegemonic power of the Washington elite. Anyone who has a rudimentary understanding of Russian history knows that this will not happen. Russia will continue to resist. And Russian resistance may well hold the key to a different future for humankind.
Why the UK, the EU and the US Gang-Up on Russia
Prof. James Petras – TRANSCEND Media Service
20 Mar 2018 - For the greater part of a decade the US, the UK and the EU have been carrying out a campaign to undermine and overthrow the Russia government and in particular to oust President Putin. Fundamental issues are at stake including the real possibility of a nuclear war.
Michael Klare. “The New Cold War.” The Nation (April 2, 2018).
Feb. 2018 signalled the NCW by 3 events: 1) US Nuclear Posture Review, 2) Chinese elimination of term limits for President, 3) Pres. Putin’s State of the Nation Address. Klare urges readers to support the No Unconstitutional Strike Against North Korea Act.
When It Comes to the Fake News Scourge, Russia Doesn’t Hold a Candle to U.S. Conservative Media
The panic over Russian interference obscures the fact that fake news has always been with us—it’s just been pushed by the American Right.
BY BRANKO MARCETIC
The Russians Are Coming, Again: The First Cold War as Tragedy, the Second as Farceby Jeremy Kuzmarov and John Marciano. Monthly Review P, May 2018. https://monthlyreview.org/product/the-russians-are-coming-again-the-first-cold-war-as-tragedy-the-second-as-farce/
Karl Marx famously wrote in The Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Napoleon that history repeats itself, “first as tragedy, then as farce.” The Cold War, waged between the United States and Soviet Union from 1945 until the latter’s dissolution in 1991, was a great tragedy, resulting in millions of civilian deaths in proxy wars, and a destructive arms race that diverted money from social spending and nearly led to nuclear annihilation. The New Cold War between the United States and Russia is playing out as farce—a dangerous one at that. The Russians Are Coming, Again is a red flag to restore our historical consciousness about U.S.-Russian relations, and how denying this consciousness is leading to a repetition of past follies.
Kuzmarov and Marciano’s book is timely and trenchant. The authors argue that the Democrats’ strategy, backed by the corporate media, of demonizing Russia and Putin in order to challenge Trump is not only dangerous, but also unjustified, misguided, and a major distraction. Grounding their argument in all-but-forgotten U.S.-Russian history, such as the 1918-20 Allied invasion of Soviet Russia, the book delivers a panoramic narrative of the First Cold War, showing it as an all-too-avoidable catastrophe run by the imperatives of class rule and political witch-hunts. The distortion of public memory surrounding the First Cold War has set the groundwork for the New Cold War, which the book explains is a key feature, skewing the nation’s politics yet again. This is an important, necessary book, one that, by including accounts of the wisdom and courage of the First Cold War’s victims and dissidents, will inspire a fresh generation of radicals in today’s new, dangerously farcical times.
In The Russians are Coming, Again, Jeremy Kuzmarov and John Marciano present an excellent and well researched effort to remind liberal America of how awful the Cold War was and how it was based on a cynical exaggeration of a largely fictional ‘Russian threat.’ Their warning against creating a new Cold War with post-communist Russia is well worth considering. —David N. Gibbs, University of Arizona; author, First Do No Harm: Humanitarian Intervention and the Destruction of Yugoslavia
Jeremy Kuzmarov is Jay P. Walker Assistant Professor of American History, University of Tulsa. He is the author of Modernizing Repression: Police Training and Nation-Building in the American Century and The Myth of the Addicted Army: Vietnam and the Modern War on Drugs, as well as numerous articles and reviews in professional journals, popular magazines, and newspapers.
John Marciano, Professor Emeritus at SUNY Cortland, is an antiwar and social justice activist, scholar, and trade unionist. He is author of The American War in Vietnam: Crime or Commemoration? and Civic Illiteracy and Education: The Battle for the Hearts and Minds of American Youth, as well as, with William L. Griffen, Teaching the Vietnam War.
2017
“The Russians Are Coming, Again” (article)
by Jeremy Kuzmarov and John Marciano
Monthly Review (Sep 01, 2017)
Alan Arkin in the Norman Jewison film, "The Russians are Coming, The Russians are Coming"
Jeremy Kuzmarov is an assistant professor of history at the University of Tulsa and the author, most recently, of Modernizing Repression (University of Massachusetts, 2012).
John Marciano is professor emeritus of education at the State University of New York, Cortland, and the author of The American War in Vietnam (Monthly Review Press, 2016).
The 1966 Academy Award-winning film The Russians Are Coming, The Russians Are Coming, directed by Norman Jewison, parodies the Cold War paranoia then pervading the United States, depicting the chaos that seizes a small coastal New England town after a Soviet submarine runs aground. Half a century later, Americans are again being warned daily of the Russian menace, with persistent accusations of Russian aggression, lies, violations of international law, and cyberattacks on U.S. elections, as reported in leading liberal outlets like the New York Times and the Washington Post.
The charges are many and relentless: the Russians invaded Georgia; the Russians tried to subvert and overthrow the Ukrainian government; the Russians shot down Malaysian Airlines Flight 17 in July 2014 over eastern Ukraine, or supported rebels that did so; the Russians annexed Crimea in 2014 in an aggressive move reminiscent of the Soviet Union’s postwar actions in Eastern Europe; the Russians have threatened smaller NATO nations in the region; and most recently, the Russians engaged in cyberwarfare by blatantly interfering in the 2016 U.S. presidential election, and then tried to manipulate the president through connections to key figures in his inner circle.
A prime example of the new Russia hysteria comes from a 2016 report in the New York Times by national security correspondents David Sanger, Eric Schmitt, and Michael R. Gordon:
For his part, Mr. Putin is counting the days until Mr. Trump is in the Oval Office. Despite a failing economy, the Russian president has been pursuing for the past four years what most Western analysts see as a plan to reassert Russian power throughout the region. First came the annexation of Crimea and the shadow war in eastern Ukraine. Then came the deployment of nuclear-capable forces to the border of NATO countries, as Moscow, working to fracture the power structures in Germany and France and promote right-wing parties, sent a reinvigorated military force on patrol off the coasts of the Baltics and Western European nations.1
Based on unproven assertions masquerading as fact (such as that Putin was working to fracture power structures and promote right-wing parties in France and Germany), the article fails to acknowledge that a verbal agreement was made in late 1990 between Mikhail Gorbachev and U.S. Secretary of State James Baker. According to the Russians—whose version is corroborated by hundreds of memos and transcripts at the George H. W. Bush presidential library—Baker pledged to Gorbachev that NATO would not expand east toward their border, in return for Russian support for German reunification.2 Since then, of course, the United States has armed and funded NATO’s eastward advance to include states that share borders with Russia. The United States also provocatively increased its naval presence in the Black Sea, and in 2014, the State Department fanned protests that led to the violent overthrow of Ukraine’s autocratic but elected pro-Russian government, prompting the Russian annexation of Crimea, and then supplied more than a billion dollars in security assistance to a new, Western-friendly right-wing regime.3
In summer 2016, the Obama administration announced the construction of a future U.S. missile defense site in Poland and the activation of a missile defense system in Romania.4 This came on top of a previously announced trillion-dollar nuclear modernization program, prompted in part by the lobbying efforts of the defense contractor Bechtel, that includes the development of new nuclear-tipped weapons, whose size and “smart” technology, according to a leading general, ensure that the use of nuclear arms is “no longer unthinkable.”5
Russia, not surprisingly, has watched these policies with alarm, itself putting five new strategic nuclear missile regiments into service in 2016, and backing the Assad government in the Syrian civil war. Former Secretary of Defense William J. Perry is among those who believe that the danger of nuclear catastrophe arising from the renewed arms race is “greater today than during the Cold War.”6
As in the original Cold War, U.S. arms manufacturers have fueled the escalation by lobbying Washington and NATO to maintain high levels of military spending, aided by hired-gun think tanks and professional “experts.” As retired Army General Richard Cody, a vice president at L-3 Communications, the seventh-largest U.S. defense contractor, explained to shareholders in December 2015, the industry faces a historic opportunity: following the end of the Cold War, peace had “pretty much broken out all over the world,” with Russia in decline and NATO nations celebrating. “The Wall came down,” he said, and “all defense budgets went south.”7 Reversing this slide toward peace required the creation of new foreign enemies, including the perception of a revived Russian imperialism—even though the U.S. military budget, totaling $609 billion in 2016, dwarfs that of Russia, which spent $65 billion.
To understand the New Cold War emerging today, it is necessary to reexamine the original conflict between the United States and the USSR. The present Russia panic follows an entire century of fearmongering and “threat inflation,” dating to the Russian Revolution, that has long served the interests of the U.S. military-industrial complex and security state. It has had little to do with either Russian or American realities, which have been consistently distorted. MORE This essay is well-worth reading, if at the moment you lack the time to read the book.https://monthlyreview.org/2017/09/01/the-russians-are-coming-again/
U.S. Military Sends Troops to Russian Border Search Results,Google Search, 10-13-17
How do Western media report Russian domestic troop movements? US promise not to expand NATO eastward following the end of the Cold War resulted in Russia’s border from Finland to Kazakstan ringed almost entirely by NATO countries and Russian internal troop movements in response being labeled aggression.
U.S. Military Sends Troops to Russian Border, Officials Say They Want 'Peace, Not War' With Russia Newsweek · 1 day ago
Russia's Military Drills Near NATO Border Raise Fears of Aggression ...
https://www.nytimes.com/2017/07/31/world/.../russia-military-exercise-zapad-west.html
Jul 31, 2017 - American military officials are concerned that Russia will use the ... is preparing to sendas many as 100,000 troops to the eastern edge of ...
Russia Sending Up to 100,000 Troops to Border of NATO Territory as ...
https://www.usnews.com/.../russia-sending-up-to-100-000-troops-to-border-of-nato-te...
ALERT - Obama Sends US MILITARY to Russian Border, Russia ...
www.angrypatriotmovement.com/russia-response-to-obama-military/
Obama has deployed United States special forces troops along Lithuania's border to protect its citizens from an “aggressive” Russia. Vladimir Putin is deploying ...
The map that shows how many Nato troops are deployed along ...
www.independent.co.uk › News › World › Europe
US Military Sends Troops to Russian Border - Rediff Realtime News
realtime.rediff.com/.../US-Military-Sends-Troops-to-Russian-Border/f47f88655a3066...
Russia has accused the U.S. of violating a peace treaty between Moscow and the Western military pact NATO after the Pentagon deployed a new force in the ...
Ukraine On Fire by Oliver Stone DVD
Editorial Reviews
Ukraine. Across its eastern border is Russia and to its west Europe. For centuries, it has been at the center of a tug-of-war between powers seeking to control its rich lands and access to the Black Sea. 2014’ s Maidan Massacre triggered a bloody uprising that ousted president Viktor Yanukovych and painted Russia as the perpetrator by Western media. But was it? Ukraine on Fire by Igor Lopatonok provides a historical perspective for the deep divisions in the region which lead to the 2004 Orange Revolution, 2014 uprisings, and the violent overthrow of democratically elected Yanukovych. Covered by Western media as a people’ s revolution, it was in fact a coup d état scripted and staged by nationalist groups and the U.S. State Department. Investigative journalist Robert Parry reveals how U.S.-funded political NGOs and media companies have emerged since the 80s replacing the CIA in promoting America s geopolitical agenda abroad. Executive producer Oliver Stone gains unprecedented access to the inside story through his on-camera interviews with former President Viktor Yanukovych and Minister of Internal Affairs, Vitaliy Zakharchenko, who explain how the U.S. Ambassador and factions in Washington actively plotted for regime change. And, in his first meeting with Russian President Vladimir Putin, Stone solicits Putin s take on the significance of Crimea, NATO and the U. S s history of interference in elections and regime change in the region.
Product details · Actors: Oliver Stone, Vladimir Putin, Viktor Yanukovych, Viktor Yushchenko, Vitaliy Zakharchenko · Directors: Igor Lopatonok · Studio: Cinema Libre Studio · DVD Release Date: July 18, 2017 · Run Time: 94 minutes |
The Putin Interviews (Showtime Documentary Films) by Oliver Stone Paperback $14.24The Plot to Scapegoat Russia: How the CIA and the Deep State Have Conspired to Vilify Putin by Dan Kovalik Paperback $12.81
"Democrats Are Repudiating FDR's Policy of Detente with Russia"
By Stephen F. Cohen, The Nation, posted January 17, 2017.
The author is a professor emeritus of Russian history and politics at Princeton University and New York University.
Early, I depended upon William Blum's history of US imperialism in his books and his newsletters. For example, Killing Hope (1986) provides a chronology of post-WWII US illegal, murderous interventions, invasions, occupations, and related depredations. Many other books and articles have reinforced this perspective. I recommend also Kovalik's The Plot to Scapegoat Russia published last year, and both well-referenced and easy to read. Our nation needs to be aware of its political bigotry. This and other OMNI newsletter discuss the Cold Wars, Sovietphobia, Russophobia, Sinophobia, US militarism, and empire from an independent point of view.. Dick
CONTENTS: RUSSIA NEWSLETTER #7, October 3, 2017
http://jamesrichardbennett.blogspot.com/2017/10/omni-russia-newsletter-7.html
Graphic: Russia Wants War?
Dick, Who’s the Aggressor?
Noam Chomsky, US/NATO Provocations
Kathy Kelly, NATO, Crimea
Protesting NATO in Lapland
New Book by Dan Kovalik, The Plot to Scapegoat Russia
Publisher’s Description
Dick, Page 29 of The Plot on USSR
Cindy Sheehan’s Interview of Kovalik
Other Comment on Russophobia
Kuzmarov and Marciano, The Russians Are Coming, Again
Cindy, Anthony Freda, Morgan Freeman
Bruce Shapiro, Investigate Russian Hacking Without Cold War Hysteria
Russia, Afghanistan, and Diplomacy
US COLD WAR AGAINST CHINA NEWSLETTER #4, May 4, 2021
https://jamesrichardbennett.blogspot.com/2021/05/us-cold-war-against-china-newsletter-4.html
COMPILED BY DICK BENNETT FOR A CULTURE OF PEACE, JUSTICE, AND ECOLOGY
END RUSSIA NEWSLETTER #8