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 ...
![https://mail.google.com/mail/u/0/images/cleardot.gif]()
“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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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. | ||||||