{"id":87580,"date":"2017-02-27T12:00:17","date_gmt":"2017-02-27T12:00:17","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/?p=87580"},"modified":"2017-02-26T17:31:59","modified_gmt":"2017-02-26T17:31:59","slug":"the-increasingly-unhinged-russia-rhetoric-comes-from-a-long-standing-u-s-playbook","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/2017\/02\/the-increasingly-unhinged-russia-rhetoric-comes-from-a-long-standing-u-s-playbook\/","title":{"rendered":"The Increasingly Unhinged Russia Rhetoric Comes from a Long-Standing U.S. Playbook"},"content":{"rendered":"
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Portrait of journalist I.F. Stone in his office in Washington in 1966.<\/p><\/div>\n

23 Feb 2017 – <\/em>For aspiring journalists,\u00a0historians, or politically engaged citizens, there are few more productive uses of one\u2019s time than randomly reading through the newsletters of I.F. Stone<\/a>, the intrepid\u00a0and independent journalist of the Cold War era who became, in my view, the nation\u2019s first \u201cblogger\u201d even though he died before the advent of the internet. Frustrated by big media\u2019s oppressive corporatized environment and its pro-government propaganda model<\/a>, and then ultimately blacklisted from mainstream media outlets for his objections to anti-Russia narratives, Stone created his own bi-monthly newsletter, sustained exclusively by subscriptions, and spent 18 years relentlessly debunking propaganda spewing from the U.S. government and its\u00a0media partners.<\/p>\n

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

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

If Communists are some supernatural breed of men, led by diabolic master minds in that distant Kremlin, engaged in a Satanic conspiracy to take over the world and enslave all mankind \u2014 and this is the thesis endlessly propounded by American liberals and conservatives alike, echoed night and day by every radio station and in every newspaper \u2014\u00a0the thesis no American dare any longer challenge without himself becoming suspect\u00a0<\/em>\u2014 then how to fight McCarthy?<\/p>\n

If the public mind is to be conditioned for war, if it is being taught to take for granted the destruction of millions of human beings, few of them tainted with this dreadful ideological virus, all of them indeed presumably pleading for us to liberate them, how can we argue that it matters if a few possibly innocent men lose jobs or reputations because of McCarthy?<\/p>\n

Two vital points stand out here: 1) the key to sustaining fears over foreign adversaries is depicting them as all-powerful and ubiquitous; and 2) once that image takes root, few will be willing to question the propaganda for fear of being accused of siding with the Foreign Evil: \u201cthe thesis no American dare any longer challenge without himself becoming suspect.\u201d<\/p>\n

This tactic \u2014 depicting adversaries as omnipotent super-villains \u2014 was key to the war on terror. Radical Muslims were not just violent threats; they were uniquely menacing, like Bond-film bad guys.<\/p>\n

When photos emerged showing how\u00a0the U.S. government was transporting terror suspect Jose Padilla to his trial by placing blackened goggles and earphones over his face, one U.S. commentator justified it by explaining<\/a>\u00a0it was necessary to prevent him from \u201cblinking in code\u201d to his terrorist comrades to activate plots.\u00a0When asked why terror suspects were bound and gagged for long intercontinental flights to Guant\u00e1namo, a U.S. military official said that<\/a> these were\u00a0\u201cpeople who would chew through a hydraulic cable to bring a C-17 down.\u201d They possessed powers of dark magic and were lurking everywhere, even when you couldn\u2019t see them. That\u2019s the reason to fear them so much that one submits to any claim and any policy in the name of crushing them.<\/p>\n

Few foreign villains have been vested with\u00a0omnipotence and ubiquity like Vladimir Putin has been \u2014 at least ever since Democrats discovered (what they mistakenly believed was) his political utility as a bogeyman. There are very few negative developments in the world that\u00a0do not end up at some point being pinned to the Russian leader, and very few critics of the Democratic Party who are not, at some point, cast as Putin loyalists or Kremlin spies:<\/p>\n

https:\/\/twitter.com\/ggreenwald\/status\/757255490866933760?ref_src=twsrc%5Etfw<\/p>\n

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Putin \u2014 like al Qaeda terrorists and Soviet Communists before him \u2014 is\u00a0everywhere. Russia is lurking behind all evils, most importantly\u00a0\u2014 of course \u2014 Hillary Clinton\u2019s defeat.\u00a0And whoever questions any of that is revealing themselves to be a traitor, likely on Putin\u2019s payroll.<\/p>\n

As The Nation\u2019s Katrina vanden Heuvel put it on Tuesday in the Washington Post<\/a>: \u201cIn the targeting of Trump, too many liberals have joined in fanning a neo-McCarthyite furor, working to discredit those who seek to deescalate U.S.-Russian tensions, and dismissing anyone expressing doubts about the charges of hacking or collusion as a Putin apologist. \u2026 What we don\u2019t need is a replay of Cold War hysteria that cuts off debate, slanders skeptics and undermines any effort to explore areas of agreement with Russia in our own national interest.\u201d That precisely echoes what\u00a0Stone observed 62 years ago: Claims of Russian infiltration and ubiquity are\u00a0\u201cthe thesis no American dare any longer challenge without himself becoming suspect\u201d (Stone was not just cast as a Kremlin loyalist during his life but smeared as a Stalinist agent after he died).<\/p>\n

I\u2019ve written extensively<\/a> about all this throughout the last year, as Russia Fever reached (what I hope is) its apex \u2014 or, more accurately, its nadir. I won\u2019t repeat that all here.<\/p>\n

But I do want to draw attention to an outstanding article in today\u2019s Guardian<\/a> by the Russian-born American journalist Keith Gessen, in which he clinically examines \u2014 and demolishes \u2014 all of the hysterical, ignorant, fearmongering, manipulative claims now predominant in U.S. discourse about Russia, Putin, and the Kremlin.<\/p>\n

The article begins: \u201cVladimir Putin, you may have noticed, is everywhere.\u201d As a result, he points out, \u201cPutinology\u201d \u2014 which he defines as \u201cthe production of commentary and analysis about Putin and his motivations, based on necessarily partial, incomplete and sometimes entirely false information\u201d \u2014\u00a0is now in great prominence even though it \u201chas existed as a distinct intellectual industry for over a decade.\u201d In sum, he writes: \u201cAt no time in history have more people with less knowledge, and greater outrage, opined on the subject of Russia\u2019s president.\u201d<\/p>\n

It\u2019s hardly unique for American media and political commentators to speak of foreign adversaries with a mix of ignorance and paranoia. But the role Putin serves above all else, he says, is to cast America\u2019s problems not as its own doing but rather the fault of foreigners, and more importantly, to relieve the Democratic Party of the need to examine its own fundamental flaws and errors:<\/p>\n

According to a recent report, Hillary Clinton and her campaign still blame the Russians \u2014 and, by extension, Barack Obama, who did not make a big issue of the hacks before November \u2014 for her electoral debacle. In this instance, thinking about Putin helps not to think about everything else that went wrong, and what needs to be done to fix it.<\/p>\n

But while petty self-exoneration may be the prime motive, the far greater danger is how much this obsession distracts from, and distorts, the pervasive corruption of America\u2019s ruling class. As Gessen writes:<\/p>\n

If Donald Trump is impeached and imprisoned for conspiring with a foreign power to undermine American democracy, I will celebrate as much as the next American. And yet in the long run, the Russia card is not just bad politics, it is intellectual and moral bankruptcy. It is an attempt to blame the deep and abiding problems of our country on a foreign power. As some commentators have pointed out, it is a page from the playbook of none other than Putin himself.<\/p>\n

As Adam Johnson detailed in the Los Angeles Times<\/a> last week, the constant effort to attribute Trump to foreign dynamics is devoted to avoiding the reality that U.S. policy and culture is what gave rise to him. Nothing achieves that goal better than continually attributing Trump \u2014 and every other negative outcome \u2014 to the secret work of Kremlin leaders.<\/p>\n

The game that\u00a0establishment Democrats and their allies are playing is not just tawdry but dangerous. The U.S. political, media, military, and intelligence classes are still full of people seeking confrontation with Russia; included among them are military officials<\/a>\u00a0whom Trump has appointed to key positions<\/a>.<\/p>\n

As Stone observed in the 1950s, aggression toward and fearmongering over the Kremlin on the one hand, and smearing domestic critics of that approach as disloyal on the other, are inextricably linked. When\u00a0one takes root, it\u2019s very difficult to stop the other. And you can only propagate demonization rhetoric about a foreign adversary for so long before triggering, wittingly or otherwise, very dangerous confrontations between the two.<\/p>\n

________________________________________<\/strong><\/p>\n

<\/a>Glenn Greenwald<\/a> – \u2709glenn.greenwald@\u200btheintercept.com<\/a><\/em><\/p>\n

Go to Original \u2013 theintercept.com<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Foreign villains must always be omnipotent, and anyone questioning that must be disloyal.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":4,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[65],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-87580","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-anglo-america"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/87580","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/4"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=87580"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/87580\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=87580"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=87580"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=87580"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}