OMNI
SOVIET/RUSSOPHOBIA ANTHOLOGY #2,
MARCH 3, 2023.
COLLECTED BY DICK BENNETT FOR A CULTURE OF PEACE, JUSTICE, AND ECOLOGY
HTTPS://omnicenter.org/donate/
My desultory search for items in both anthologies mainly came randomly through the internet. But when I completed #2, I checked the Mullins Library at UAF. A quick “simple” search and turned up 205 entries. So I will have plenty to choose from for #3. https://onesearch.uark.edu/discovery/search?query=any,contains,russophobia&vid=01UARK_INST:01UARK&tab=COMBINED&search_scope=MyInstand_CI
CONTENTS Russophobia #2
Eliot Borenstein. Plots against Russia : Conspiracy and Fantasy after Socialism. Cornell UP, 2019.
Nord Stream Sabotage
Seymour Hersh. “How America Took Out The Nord Stream Pipeline.”
Prabir Purkayastha. “Mapping Faultlines: The Planning, Execution, and
Aftermath of Nord Stream sabotage.”
Steve Brown. “Why Is Assange in Jail and Not Seymour Hersh?”
Clare Daly. “… there must be consequences for the vandals who did it.”
Blame the Russians
Matt Taibbi. The Campaign to Smear Critics of the Democratic Party by
Associating Them with Russia. The Chris Hedges Report.
Moon Of Alabama. “On the Media of Russiagate.”
Caitlin Johnstone. Johnstone as Agent of Russian Propaganda, Western
Propaganda, Public and Media Hysteria.
War on Russia
Chay Bowes. “Ukraine—The Inevitable War.” Minsk Accords Abused by
Ukraine, Destabilizing Russia, Russian Warnings.
Gleason, J. H. The Genesis of Russophobia in Great Britain; a Study of the Interaction of Policy and Opinion.” 1950.
Anthology #1
https://jamesrichardbennett.blogspot.com/2023/02/omni-sovietrussophobia-anthology-1.html
TEXTS
2 Books Reviewed in #1
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.
Rise of Conspiratorial World View in Russia
Borenstein, Eliot. Plots against Russia : Conspiracy and Fantasy after Socialism. Cornell UP, 2019.
In this original and timely assessment of cultural expressions of paranoia in contemporary Russia, Eliot Borenstein samples popular fiction, movies, television shows, public political pronouncements, internet discussions, blogs, and religious tracts to build a sense of the deep historical and cultural roots of konspirologiia that run through Russian life. Plots against Russia reveals through dramatic and exciting storytelling that conspiracy and melodrama are entirely equal-opportunity in modern Russia, manifesting themselves among both pro-Putin elites and his political opposition. As Borenstein shows, this paranoid fantasy until recently characterized only the marginal and the irrelevant. Now, through its embodiment in pop culture, the expressions of a conspiratorial worldview are seen everywhere. Plots against Russia is an important contribution to the fields of Russian literary and cultural studies from one of its preeminent voices. Available at UAF’s Mullins as an electronic book only.
Nord Stream sabotage: Illegal Crimes against Russia with Impunity
[US bombing of two Russian natural gas pipelines to Europe was an unprovoked act of war against Russia. This gives Russia an absolute legal right to retaliate under Chapter VII, Article 51, of the United Nations Charter, which cites self-defense as an exception to the prohibition against the use of force. But I hope Russia will employ legal avenues to restitution. --Dick]
Award-winning investigative journalist Sy Hersh reports that USA is behind the bombing of Nord Stream, a grave act of war escalation against not only Russia, but also Germany & Europe.
Abel Feb.8, 2023
https://scheerpost.com/2023/02/08/how-america-took-out-the-nord-stream-pipeline/amp/
“How America Took Out The Nord Stream Pipeline”by Seymour Hersh. / Substack [Reveals the major war crime committed by the US against the Russian government called “Nord Stream.” The cries by US officials for the prosecution of Vladimir Putin for war crimes must include Joe Biden. –Dick]
Seymour M. Hersh’s fearless reporting has earned him fame, front-page bylines, a staggering collection of awards, and no small amount of controversy. His story is one of fierce independence.
Faced with pressure from corporate interests, the various muscular arms of government, and occasionally from outright criminals, Hersh has been relentless in his pursuit of truth and his belief in challenging the official narrative. He has navigated through cover-ups, deceit, and outright crimes against humanity in the morass of war, espionage, and politics.
He has been a staff writer for The New Yorker and The New York Times and established himself at the forefront of investigative journalism in 1970 when he was awarded a Pulitzer Prize (as a freelancer) for his exposé of the massacre in the Vietnamese hamlet of My Lai. Since then he has received the George Polk Award five times, the National Magazine Award for Public Interest twice, the Los Angeles Times Book Prize, the National Book Critics Circle Award, the George Orwell Award, and dozens of other accolades.
He lives in Washington, D.C.
Categories: Nord Stream II, Russia-Ukraine, Seymour Hersh
Tags: antony blinken, biden admin, biden administration, CIA, featured, germany, jake sullivan, joe biden, nato, navy, nord stream pipeline, nsa, putin, robert scheer, russia, sabotage, scheerpost, seymour hersh, ukraine, victoria nuland, Washington, zelensky
This is a passage from Seymour Hersh’s Substack, which launched today, Feb. 8, 2023. Subscribe to it here.
The U.S. Navy’s Diving and Salvage Center can be found in a location as obscure as its name—down what was once a country lane in rural Panama City, a now-booming resort city in the southwestern panhandle of Florida, 70 miles south of the Alabama border. The center’s complex is as nondescript as its location—a drab concrete post-World War II structure that has the look of a vocational high school on the west side of Chicago. A coin-operated laundromat and a dance school are across what is now a four-lane road.
The center has been training highly skilled deep-water divers for decades who, once assigned to American military units worldwide, are capable of technical diving to do the good—using C4 explosives to clear harbors and beaches of debris and unexploded ordinance—as well as the bad, like blowing up foreign oil rigs, fouling intake valves for undersea power plants, destroying locks on crucial shipping canals. The Panama City center, which boasts the second largest indoor pool in America, was the perfect place to recruit the best, and most taciturn, graduates of the diving school who successfully did last summer what they had been authorized to do 260 feet under the surface of the Baltic Sea.
Last June, the Navy divers, operating under the cover of a widely publicized mid-summer NATO exercise known as BALTOPS 22, planted the remotely triggered explosives that, three months later, destroyed three of the four Nord Stream pipelines, according to a source with direct knowledge of the operational planning.
Two of the pipelines, which were known collectively as Nord Stream 1, had been providing Germany and much of Western Europe with cheap Russian natural gas for more than a decade. A second pair of pipelines, called Nord Stream 2, had been built but were not yet operational. Now, with Russian troops massing on the Ukrainian border and the bloodiest war in Europe since 1945 looming, President Joseph Biden saw the pipelines as a vehicle for Vladimir Putin to weaponize natural gas for his political and territorial ambitions. MORE https://scheerpost.com/2023/02/08/how-america-took-out-the-nord-stream-pipeline/amp/scheerpost.com
FALLOUT
In the immediate aftermath of the pipeline bombing, the American media treated it like an unsolved mystery. Russia was repeatedly cited as a likely culprit, spurred on by calculated leaks from the White House—but without ever establishing a clear motive for such an act of self-sabotage, beyond simple retribution. A few months later, when it emerged that Russian authorities had been quietly getting estimates for the cost to repair the pipelines, the New York Times described the news as “complicating theories about who was behind” the attack. No major American newspaper dug into the earlier threats to the pipelines made by Biden and Undersecretary of State Nuland.
While it was never clear why Russia would seek to destroy its own lucrative pipeline, a more telling rationale for the President’s action came from Secretary of State Blinken. Asked at a press conference last September about the consequences of the worsening energy crisis in Western Europe, Blinken described the moment as a potentially good one: “It’s a tremendous opportunity to once and for all remove the dependence on Russian energy and thus to take away from Vladimir Putin the weaponization of energy as a means of advancing his imperial designs. That’s very significant and that offers tremendous strategic opportunity for the years to come, but meanwhile we’re determined to do everything we possibly can to make sure the consequences of all of this are not borne by citizens in our countries or, for that matter, around the world.” More recently, Victoria Nuland expressed satisfaction at the demise of the newest of the pipelines. Testifying at a Senate Foreign Relations Committee hearing in late January she told Senator Ted Cruz, “Like you, I am, and I think the Administration is, very gratified to know that Nord Stream 2 is now, as you like to say, a hunk of metal at the bottom of the sea.”
The source had a much more streetwise view of Biden’s decision to sabotage more than 1500 miles of Gazprom pipeline as winter approached. “Well,” he said, speaking of the President, “I gotta admit the guy has a pair of balls. He said he was going to do it, and he did.”
Asked why he thought the Russians failed to respond, he said cynically, “Maybe they want the capability to do the same things the U.S. did. “It was a beautiful cover story,” he went on. “Behind it was a covert operation that placed experts in the field and equipment that operated on a covert signal.
“The only flaw was the decision to do it.”
Mapping Faultlines: “The planning, execution, and aftermath of Nord tream sabotage.” By Prabir Purkayastha (Posted Feb 21, 2023)
Originally published: Peoples Dispatch on February 18, 2023 (more by Peoples Dispatch) |
Imperialism, Inequality, Strategy, WarAmericas, Europe, Germany, Russia, Ukraine, United StatesNewswireJake Sullivan, natural gas, Nord Stream pipelines, President Joe Biden, Russia-Ukraine War, Seymour Hersh, Victoria Nuland
In this episode, NewsClick’s Prabir Purkayastha talks about the revelations by renowned journalist Seymour Hersh on the sabotage of the Nord Stream pipelines in September 2022. Hersh reported that the U.S. and Norway conducted the operations that led to the explosions on the pipelines. Prabir explains the significance of the pipelines, the details of the operation according to Hersh, and who benefited from the pipelines becoming inoperational.
About Prabir Purkayastha: Prabir Purkayastha is the founding editor of Newsclick.in, a digital media platform. He is an activist for science and the Free Software movement.
STEVE BROWN. “Why is Assange in Jail and Not Seymour Hersh?” FEBRUARY 27, 2023.
On February 7, Seymour Hersh – arguably the most credible investigative journalist of our era – published a bombshell exposé revealing that the United States was guilty of blowing up the Nord Stream II undersea pipeline that was supposed to deliver natural gas from Russia to the Federal Republic of Germany.
Hersh’s revelations were based entirely on classified information leaked to him by a member of the government with first-hand knowledge of the planning and implementation of the attack on the pipeline – a member of the government who clearly broke the law by violating his fiduciary duty not to reveal classified information to an unauthorized source.
Like Chelsea Manning, who had revealed classified information to Julian Assange, for which she was convicted and sentenced to 35 years in prison, Hersh’s source, if identified, would surely also be convicted and sentenced to similar long-term imprisonment.
But Hersh’s source has not been identified. However – Hersh himself has. According to the same logic under which Assange was indicted for publishing classified information, and now faces up to 175 years in prison, Hersh, too, should be indicted and face comparable long-term imprisonment.
So why is Sy Hersh still free?
Hersh broke the same laws that the U.S. government accuses Julian Assange of breaking. But unlike Assange, a foreigner whom the U.S. has unsuccessfully been trying to extradite from England for years, Hersh is an American citizen living right here in the United States – easy to find, cuff, indict, convict and throw in prison for the rest of his life.
So why is Sy Hersh still free?
Surely the classified information that Hersh has revealed is even more dangerous to the safety of the U.S. than what Assange revealed. Hersh showed that the U.S. had committed an unprovoked act of war against Russia. This gives Russia an absolute legal right to retaliate under Chapter VII, Article 51, of the United Nations Charter, which cites self-defense as an exception to the prohibition against the use of force.
Since Russia happens to be a nuclear power, its potential retaliation could trigger World War III and wipe out not just the U.S. but the entire human race. Therefore, in any comparison of who has placed the U.S. in greater danger – Julian Assange is a piker compared to Sy Hersh.
So why is Sy Hersh still free?
The answer is this. Although President Joe Biden, Secretary of State Anthony Blinken and Under Secretary of State for Political Affairs Victoria Nuland would love to throw Sy Hersh into a maximum security prison for the rest of his life, as punishment for revealing their complicity in blowing up the Nord Stream II pipelines – they don’t dare to. If they did, it would be tantamount to admitting that … what Hersh published is true.
Which would be embarrassing, to say the least, because Biden and Company have spent every day since February 7 denying that Hersh’s revelations are true. In other words, they claim he made it all up – which means, according to them, that he did not publish classified information. Therefore he cannot be guilty of any crime.
That’s the frustrating double bind in which Biden now finds himself. It must drive him crazy. Because the day he sends federal agents to put the cuffs on Sy Hersh, that is the day he and Blinken and Nuland will have to admit that they lied, that Hersh’s exposé is true, and that they did indeed order the destruction of the Nord stream pipelines.
So of course that day will never come, and Sy Hersh will remain a free man. Which is why, at least this one time, I am glad that our leaders are liars.
Clare Daly. “Methane is 80 times more potent as a greenhouse gas than CO2.” Facebook. 10-28-22.
Environment, Inequality, Strategy, WarAmericas, Europe, Germany, Russia, United StatesNewswireNord Stream pipelines
Methane is 80 times more potent as a greenhouse gas than CO2. The #NordStream sabotage released 300,000 metric tonnes of this gas into our atmosphere–a climate and environmental crime. It must be fully and independently investigated and there must be consequences for the vandals who did it.
Paint Russia Bloody Red, RUSSIAGATE and other allegations
| 2:26 PM (2 hours ago) |
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Matt Taibbi Exposes the Russiagate Campaign to smear critics of the Democratic Party,
Matt Taibbi has published an investigation about a vast propaganda campaign called “Hamilton 68,” launched a year after Donald Trump won the presidency, to smear critics of the Democratic Party, from the left and the right, as Russian assets. | ||||||||||||||||||||||||
Moon of Alabama. “On the media of ‘Russiagate’ and related fake stories.” 2-2-23. Editor. Mronline.org (2-5-23).
Media, Movements, State Repression, StrategyAmericas, Europe, Russia, United StatesNewswire
Last week Matt Taibbi, with access to Twitter’s internal papers, debunked the fake Hamilton 68 propaganda dashboardthat was used to create many stories about alleged Russian disinformation. I had done similar five years earlier but had no access to the original data. There were enough secondary indications to conclude that the dashboard was a sham. Still, have the case made with primary data is a valuable addition.
There has been no Russian influence or disinformation campaign.
Two days later the Columbia Journalism Review (CJR) published a five part longread from an 18 month long investigation into the ‘Russiagate’ drama and on how the media had cooked it up.
Caitlin A. Johnstone. “They’re not worried about ‘Russian influence’, they’re worried about dissent.” Mronline.org (2-7-23).
Originally published: Caitlin A Johnstone Blog on February 5, 2023 (more by Caitlin A Johnstone Blog). Inequality, Media, Strategy, WarAmericas, United StatesNewswire
Being labeled a Russian propagandist all day every day for criticizing U.S. foreign policy is really weird, but one advantage it comes with is a useful perspective on what people have really been talking about all these years when they warn of the dangers of “Russian propaganda”.
I know I’m not a Russian propagandist. I’m not paid by Russia, I have no connections to Russia, and until I started this political commentary gig in 2016 I thought very little about Russia. My opinions about the western empire sometimes turn up on Russian media because I let anyone use my work who wants to, but that was always something they did on their own without my submitting it to them and without any payment or solicitation of any kind. I’m literally just some random westerner sharing political opinions on the internet; those opinions just happen to disagree with the U.S. empire and its stories about itself and its behavior.
Yet for years I’ve watched people pointing at me as an example of what “Russian propaganda” looks like. This has helped inform my understanding of all the panic about “Russian influence” that’s been circulating these last six years, and given me some insight into how seriously it should be taken.
That’s one reason why I wasn’t surprised by Matt Taibbi’s reporting on the Twitter Files revelations about Hamilton 68, an information op run by DC swamp monsters and backed by imperialist think tanks which generated hundreds if not thousands of completely bogus mainstream news reports about online Russian influence over the years.
Hamilton 68 purported to track Russian attempts to influence western thought on social media, but Twitter eventually figured out that the “Russians” the operation has been tracking were actually mostly real, mostly American accounts who just happened to say things that didn’t perfectly align with the official Beltway consensus. These accounts were often right-leaning, but also included people like Consortium News editor Joe Lauria, who’s about as far from a rightist as you can get.
They played a massive role in fanning the flames of public hysteria about online Russian influence, but while they did this by pretending to track the behavior of Russian influence ops, in reality they were tracking dissent.
One of the craziest things happening in the world today is the way westerners are being brainwashed by western propaganda into panicking about Russian propaganda, something that has no meaningful existence in the west. Before RT was shut down it was drawing a whopping 0.04 percent of the UK’s total TV audience. The much-touted Russian election interference campaign on Facebook was mostly unrelated to the election and affected “approximately 1 out of 23,000 pieces of content” according o Facebook. Research by New York University into Russian trolling behavior on Twitter in the lead-up to the 2016 election has found “no evidence of a meaningful relationship between exposure to the Russian foreign influence campaign and changes in attitudes, polarization, or voting behavior.” A study by the University of Adelaide found that despite all the warnings of Russian bots and trolls following Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, the overwhelming majority of inauthentic behavior on Twitter during that time was anti-Russian in nature.
Russia exerts essentially zero influence over what westerners think, yet we’re all meant to freak out about “Russian propaganda” while western oligarchs and government agencies continually hammer our minds with propaganda designed to manufacture our consent for the status quo which benefits them.
WAR AGAINST RUSSIANS, REJECTING THE MINSK
AGREEMENT
Chay Bowes. “Ukraine—The Inevitable War.” CovertAction
Magazine Feb 05, 2023. 11:02 am.
Why negotiate a diplomatic settlement and adhere to the Minsk agreement when there is so much money in war?
During a recent interview with German magazine Der Spiegel, former Chancellor and European political heavyweight Angela Merkel revealed that the Minsk accords, a comprehensive 2015 diplomatic treaty, agreed by the EU, United States, Russia, and Kyiv to end the civil war in eastern Ukraine, was essentially subverted by the Ukrainians in an attempt to buy time to expand its military capabilities.
The fact that the accords, which were widely regarded as a truly workable solution to the conflict, were not prioritized by the U.S. for implementation, speaks volumes when assessing the sincerity of the U.S. position. Just prior to Merkel’s stunning revelations, Former Ukrainian President Petro Poroshenko was also covertly recorded admitting that the process was abused by Ukraine and used to prepare for war with Russia.
Given the high level of interface between NATO and Ukraine during this period, it is difficult to imagine that this manipulation of the peace process was not carried out with the full knowledge, and probable assistance, of NATO and the U.S. It is now abundantly clear, at least to all objective observers, that the U.S. never seriously intended to prevent the current conflict in Ukraine. On the contrary, any cursory assessment of their past and contemporary covert and overt involvement in the region suggests they have been working to destabilize Russia via Ukraine for decades.
Facts such as their encouragement, and material assistance, in the building of a huge 250,000-man, NATO-trained and equipped army facing Russia’s border, illustrate the reality of what the U.S. project in Ukraine was about, regardless of their diplomatic pronouncements.
Despite decades of Russian warnings on NATO expansion, and despite the sincere attempts of some European countries, NATO and its U.S. kingpins forged ahead along a path to what would become an inevitable war. Considering this, can any of the numerous U.S./NATO statements suggesting they “exhausted all diplomatic efforts” to prevent this conflict be taken seriously? The facts suggest not.
As the second phaseof the conflict in Ukraine grinds toward its first bloody anniversary, the first being the post-Maidan civil war which erupted in 2014, the grim realities of this conflict, both economic and human, are now indelibly burned into the global consciousness not only of the Ukrainian and Russian populations, but also the pro-war political aristocracy in the U.S. and their client EU/NATO allies.
In recent weeks, whispers of peace have emerged, uncharacteristically, from the eternally hawkish, “absolute victory” brigade in Washington. It is undeniable that these war hawks wield a disproportionate influence on Zelensky’s government, with many dissenting analysts suggesting it is they who essentially operate the levers of power in his Kyiv palace.
Before accepting this dubious kite flying for peace as genuine, observers would be advised to research the long, determined and cynical march into this inevitable conflict, a clash long predicted by scholars like Mearsheimer and Chomsky, who have persistently highlighted the central role that the United States and its proxies in the EU had in willfully manufacturing its inevitability. Conflicts between great powers tend not to occur overnight, and with this being such a high-stakes game, where the very balance of global power is potentially shifting, nothing happens unless it is supposed to happen. Essentially, when it comes to the conflict in Ukraine, the power bloc that emerges victorious will potentially dominate a new global order; in other words “this game is for all the marbles.” […]
Gleason, J. H. The genesis of Russophobia in Great Britain ; a study of the interaction of policy and opinion. 1950.
“Few matters can be of greater importance at the present day
than the establishment of mutual trust and toleration between
the Soviet Union and English-speaking peoples. It is my hope
that the present study of the origins and early development of
Russophobia in Great Britain may in some slight measure foster
such sympathy. The story is one of the disruption of cordiality
and the growth of hostility between Russia and the United
Kingdom at a time when the basic foreign policies of the two
nations were, if not identical, at least complementary. It is to
be hoped that relatively trivial disagreements will not again
perpetuate a lack of mutual understanding and thus induce
insuperable fear and hatred. . . .
Russophobia is a paradox in the history of Great Britain.
Within the United Kingdom there developed early in the nine-
teenth century an antipathy toward Russia which soon became
the most pronounced and enduring element in the national out-
look on the world abroad. The contradictory sequel of nearly
three centuries of consistently friendly relations, this hostility
found expression in the Crimean War.
Available at Main Library Request from Mullins Library Annex (DA47.65 .G55).
Also available online (my source): https://archive.org/stream/in.ernet.dli.2015.16696/2015.16696.The-Genesis-Of-Russophobia-In-Great-Britain_djvu.txt
PREFACE
#1 https://jamesrichardbennett.blogspot.com/2023/02/omni-sovietrussophobia-anthology-1.html
CONTENTS
Books
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 Assault.
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.
END OMNISOVIET/RUSSOPHOBIA ANTHOLOGY #2, 2023.