In dit
artikel dat tevens een 13 minuten durend (audio) interview bevat met hem bevat, verklaart McGovern waarom MICIMATT (Military-Industrial-Congressional-Intelligence-Media-Academia-Think-Tank)
complex, inclusief Wal Street, Silicon Valley en de Democratische
Partij, Rusland (en China) demoniseren: het voor het volk
‘geloofwaardig’ maken van het blijvend opvoeren van het budget voor
oorlogsvoering, zoveel dat het zelfs meer dan de helft beslaat van
het totaal te besteden budget. Dat ‘geloofwaardig maken’ uiteraard
verklaard met de noodzaak tot verdediging van het land (alsof ook
maar iemand de VS, de grootste terreurentiteit ter wereld, militair
de baas zou kunnen…….)
McGovern
vraagt zich af of het mogelijk zou zijn dat Biden tot een vergelijk
met Putin zou kunnen komen, echter hij weet in tegenstelling tot
Trump dat de oorlogsmachine hem levend zou opvreten…… Zou een VS
president het wenselijk achten om spanningen met Rusland (dan wel
China) te verminderen en daarmee de dreiging van oorlog weg te nemen
dan wel te doen afnemen, dan zou deze uiterst handig moeten kunnen opereren en dat stap voor stap, dit soms in het geheim, zoals
president Kennedy heeft gedaan en zie wat er met hem gebeurde, aldus
McGovern……. McGovern stelt dat geen geheim is dat de VS de opstand in Oekraïne heeft georganiseerd, daarover is zelfs een telefoongesprek van de NSA geopenbaard, een opstand in de hoop dat deze zou overslaan naar Rusland, zo concludeerde de Russische overheid (terecht)…….. (dat telefoongesprek wordt door McGovern woordelijk herhaald in het audiofragment)
McGovern
gebruikt voor de Security State (met als belangrijkste partijen: FBI, CIA en NSA) de ‘initialen’ SS en niet voor
niets…… Hij stelt dan ook dat de SS de handhaver en uitvoerder is
voor de MICIMATT. MICIMATT met als grote promotors Silicon Valley, Wall Straat (wapenverkoop) en de Democratische Partij……… Daarom moeten verbeterde relaties met Rusland ten koste van alles worden voorkomen, waarbij McGovern dat ten koste van alles
nog eens herhaalt…….. Over die kosten gesproken: de grote promotor van deze VS agressie is het militair industrieel complex…… Rusland (en China) moest wel worden aangemerkt als vijand, daar het bouwen van bijvoorbeeld vliegdekschepen en stealth bommenwerpers t.b.v. de oorlog tegen terreur niet meer nodig was daar de VS groepen als ISIS zou hebben verslagen. Daar wil ik bij opmerken dat de VS deze terreurgroepen nu in haar greep heeft, zo heeft de VS een belangrijk deel van de Syrische olievelden bezet, een gebied waar het ook de aanwezige terreurgroepen, inclusief een groot aantal ISIS strijders beschermt tegen het Syrische leger en de Russische luchtmacht…….
Dat
McGovern gelijk heeft is maar al te duidelijk en het is een schande
dat de reguliere westerse media willens en wetens de westerse
volkeren hersenspoelen met de leugens die e.e.a. mogelijk maken…..
Hoe kunnen die media keer op keer Rusland, China en Iran beschuldigen
van agressie, terwijl de VS en haar oorlogshond de NAVO alleen deze
eeuw al minstens 5 miljoen mensen hebben vermoord, iets wat ze niet
in de verste verte kunnen zeggen over Rusland, China en Iran, sterker
nog deze landen beginnen geen illegale oorlogen, die dan door de
reguliere westerse media als in het geval van de VS worden
voorgesteld als noodzakelijk en onoverkomelijk….. (voor hetzelfde
geldt kunnen die media door het westen gepleegde massamoorden als
noodzakelijk opvoeren, sterker nog met het steunen van de VS terreur doen ze dat in feite al …..) Niet voor niets dat een gelauwerde
onderzoeksjournalist als Julian Assange, die oorlogsmisdaden van de
VS openbaarde, door de reguliere westerse media als verrader en
gevaarlijke gek wordt voorgesteld……*
Lees
het artikel van McGovern en beluister het interview met Cohen en zegt
het voort! Terreurentiteit VS moet zo snel mogelijk worden gestopt en
het is van het grootste belang dat de westerse volkeren ontwaken uit
hun door de reguliere media opgewekte kunstmatige coma….(vergeet niet dat de oorlogshandelingen van de VS, met hulp van de NAVO, één van de grootste bedreigingen vormen voor het bereiken van bijvoorbeeld stabiliteit in het Midden-Oosten, het kruitvat van de wereld….)….. Onder het artikel kan je klikken voor een ‘Dutch vertaling’, dit neemt wel enkele tientallen seconden tijd in beslag.
Why
Russia Must Be Demonized
By
Ray McGovern
January 01, 2020
“Information
Clearing House”
– I had a chance to devote the first 7 minutes of an interview
to explaining why the MICIMATT (including Wall St., Silicon Valley, &
the Democratic Party) have all joined together to portray Russia (and
now also China) as the enemies it desperately needs in order to
“justify” spending more than half of the discretionary budget on
“defense”. It is necessary, of course, to be able to “explain”
— defense against what?
Is there any hope that
Biden will extend an olive branch to President Putin? He could, but —
unlike Trump — he knows quite well that the war machine would eat
him alive. Should a U.S. president wish to reduce tensions and
make war less likely, that president must be able to move adroitly,
step-by-step, sometimes in secret — as President Kennedy
demonstrated. And look what happened to him.
I believe all
successor presidents are quite aware of what happened to JFK, and
why. (The best book on this is James Douglass’s “JFK and
the Unspeakable: Why He Died and Why It Matters”.)
The SS functions as
enforcer for the MICIMATT
(Military-Industrial-Congressional-Intelligence-Media-Academia-Think-Tank)
complex. Improved ties with Russia are to be thwarted at all,
repeat all, costs.
If extending genuine
olive branches is out of the question, will Biden, during his
proverbial “honeymoon period”, at least be able to extend the New
START treaty limiting strategic arms? Will even this small step
be thwarted, lest it lead to a step-by-step relaxation in U.S.-Russia
tensions? The treaty expires on Feb. 5, 2021, so we’re likely
to know soon enough.
In the full (13 min)
interview I gave yesterday, I had time to do a short tutorial, citing
a number of not well known “flat facts” — very unlike those to
be found on the pages of the the Washington
Post.
Ray McGovern.
Former longtime CIA officer, who served as chief of the CIA’s
Soviet analysts division, chaired National Intelligence Estimates,
and prepared the President’s Daily Brief. He is also the co-founder
of Veteran Intelligence Professionals for Sanity. https://raymcgovern.com/
See
also
Stephen
F. Cohen on Russia’s democratization and how US meddling undermines
it
VS valt
al vanaf 2012 het Russische elektriciteitsnet aan, dit vanwege
de bemoeienissen met de VS verkiezingen in 2016 en 2018…… NOS schiet alweer een bok
In het
Radio1 nieuws van 9.30 u. afgelopen zondagmorgen het bericht van de
NOS nieuwsredactie dat de VS sinds 2012 al meer dan 70 cyberaanvallen
heeft uitgevoerd op het Russische elektriciteitsnet. Volgens de
nieuwslezer doet de VS dit om te laten zien dat het terug kan slaan
na een cyberaanval…… Kijk en daar ging de nieuwsredactie voor de
zoveelste keer plat op de bek, immers die zogenaamde cyberaanvallen
van de Russen, waar geen nanometer aan bewijs voor werd geleverd,
zijn van de laatste paar jaar en niet van 2012……
Kortom
de nieuwsredactie van de NOS denkt dat de VS in 2012 door een
boodschap uit de toekomst is overgegaan tot cyberaanvallen op het
elektriciteitsnet van Rusland…..
Wat betreft het voorgaande is wel duidelijk aan welke kant de zogenaamde onafhankelijke NOS staat…… (en dat is niet aan de Russische kant, zelfs een onafhankelijk standpunt gaat de NOS nieuwsredactie blijkbaar te ver)
Wat het
bericht ten overvloede nog eens aantoont is dat het de VS is, voor wie
niets of niemand veilig is, zelfs de partners worden uit en te na
bespioneerd door de VS, zoals de Duitse premier Merkel, van wie zelfs
de telefoon werd afgeluisterd door de VS….. Bovendien zijn het niet
andere landen maar de VS zelf die als eerste cyberaanvallen uitvoert,
zoals die op het elektriciteitsnet in Iran en sinds een aantal weken af en aan in Venezuela…. (overigens e.e.a.
doet bijna vermoeden dat de VS cyberterroristen een fout hebben
gemaakt in Zuid-Amerika, waar zelfs een paar landen gistermorgen zonder
stroom kwamen te zitten…..)
We mogen
bij wijze van spreken god op onze blote knieën danken dat niet de
Russen aanvallen hebben uitgevoerd op het elektriciteitsnet van de
VS, daar we anders waarschijnlijk al in WOIII waren beland, immers de
Trump administratie heeft vorig jaar nog laten weten dat een
cyberaanval op het elektriciteitsnet van de VS, een reden zou zijn om
het verantwoordelijke land aan te vallen en dat zelfs met
kernwapens…….. (zo de waard is vertrouwt deze de gasten; alleen
in dit geval is het juist de waard die uitermate misdadig bezig is en
dat waar de gasten bij zitten…..)
Het
volgende artikel is van Caitlin Johnstone en zij beziet de
zaak ook vanuit een ander standpunt, waarin ze ook professor Stephen F. Cohen noemt, een echte deskundige op het gebied van de (verstoorde) relatie tussen Rusland en de VS:
TheNew
York Times has
published an anonymously sourced report titled “U.S.
Escalates Online Attacks on Russia’s Power Grid”
about the “placement of potentially crippling malware inside the
Russian system at a depth and with an aggressiveness that had never
been tried before” which could potentially “plunge Russia
into darkness or cripple its military,” with one anonymous
official reporting that “We are doing things at a scale that we
never contemplated a few years ago.”
Obviously
this is yet another serious escalation in the continually
mounting series of stepsthat
have been taken into a new cold war between the planet’s two nuclear
superpowers. Had a report been leaked to Russian media from anonymous
Kremlin officials that Moscow was escalating its cyber-aggressions
against America’s energy grid, this would doubtless be labeled an act
of war by the political/media class of the US and its allies with
demands for immediate retaliation.
To
put this in perspective, The
New York Timesreported
last year that
the Pentagon was pushing for the US Nuclear Posture Review to include
the strategy of retaliating against serious Russian cyberattacks on
American power grids with
nuclear weapons.
So
that’s scary enough. What’s even scarier is the information that
the Times buried
way down in the 21st
to 23rd paragraphs of
its report:
“Two
administration officials said they believed Mr. Trump had not been
briefed in any detail about the steps to place ‘implants’ —
software code that can be used for surveillance or attack — inside
the Russian grid.
“Pentagon
and intelligence officials described broad hesitation to go into
detail with Mr. Trump about operations against Russia for concern
over his reaction — and the possibility that he might countermand
it or discuss it with foreign officials, as he did in 2017 when
he mentioned a sensitive operation in Syria to the Russian foreign
minister.
“Because
the new law defines the actions in cyberspace as akin to traditional
military activity on the ground, in the air or at sea, no such
briefing would be necessary, they added.”
“New
laws, enacted by Congress last year, allow such ‘clandestine military
activity’ in cyberspace to go ahead without the president’s
approval. So, in this case, those new laws are protecting American
interests… by keeping the sitting president out of the loop. What a
(scary) time to be alive.”
So
Trump is in a bit of a bind now. The escalation has already been put
in place, which will likely see an equal response from Moscow if it
isn’t scaled back. But scaling it back would mean a whole new wave of
shrieking alarmism from the political/media class about the
conspiracy theory that just won’t die no matter how much evidence is
mounted against it: that Trump is a controlled puppet of the Kremlin.
All as he’s working to build the case for re-election in 2020.
Stephen
F Cohen, professor emeritus of Russian studies at New York University
and Princeton University and one of America’s leading experts on
US-Russia relations, has been warning for years that exactly this
would happen. In an April 2017 interview
on Democracy
Now,
Cohen warned that placing political pressure on a US president to
never step back from escalations during a showdown between nuclear
superpowers could have potentially world-ending consequences should
mounting tensions see a situation similar to the Cuban missile crisis
again.
“I
think this is the most dangerous moment in American-Russian
relations, at least since the Cuban missile crisis,” Cohen said.
“And arguably, it’s more dangerous, because it’s more
complex. Therefore, we—and then, meanwhile, we have in Washington
these—and, in my judgment, factless accusations that Trump has
somehow been compromised by the Kremlin. So, at this worst moment in
American-Russian relations, we have an American president who’s
being politically crippled by the worst imaginable—it’s
unprecedented. Let’s stop and think. No American president has ever
been accused, essentially, of treason. This is what we’re talking
about here, or that his associates have committed treason.”
“Imagine,
for example, John Kennedy during the Cuban missile crisis,”
Cohen said. “Imagine if Kennedy had been accused of being a
secret Soviet Kremlin agent. He would have been crippled. And the
only way he could have proved he wasn’t was to have launched a war
against the Soviet Union. And at that time, the option was nuclear
war.”
People
rarely take time to deeply reflect on the uniquely important fact
that our species came within a hair’s breadth of total annihilation
during the Cuban missile crisis. We learned long after it was all
over that the only reason a nuclear-armed Soviet submarine didn’t
discharge its payload on the US Navy and set off a full-scale nuclear
exchange between the US and the USSR was because one of the three men
in the sub needed to authorize the weapon’s use stood against the
other two and refused. That man’s name was Vasili
Arkhipov,
and he’s responsible for the fact that you and everyone you love
exists today.
President
Kennedy was on the phone constantly with the Soviets during the Cuban
missile crisis, and any number of things could have gone
cataclysmically wrong during that exchange had Kennedy not made
certain concessions at certain times and known when to hold back
instead of pressing forward. He made a series of diplomatic
moves that would not be possible in this current paranoid, leak-prone
climate, including secretly
recalling the USA’s Jupiter missiles from
their position in Turkey at Khrushchev’s request.
For
all the outrage that liberals display whenever a high-profile
Republican utters the phrase “deep state”, it sure is
interesting that the Commander-in-Chief has found himself in a
situation where he is at the whim of a collective of warmongers who
are advancing pre-existing agendas against a nation they perceive as
a geostrategic threat to US hegemony. It begs the question, who is
really in charge?
The
US war machine is the most powerful military force in the history of
civilization, and the alliance of nations that it upholds is
functionally the most powerful empire that the world has ever seen.
Because so much power depends on the behavior of this gargantuan war
engine, it is seen by those with real power as too important to be
left to the will of the electorate, and too important to be left to
the will of the elected Commander-in-Chief. This is why Americans are
the most propagandized people in the world, this is why Russia
hysteria has been blasted into their psyches for three years, and
this is why we are all at an ever-increasing risk of dying in a
nuclear holocaust.
UPDATE: Trump now
seems like he might be denying that
what The
New York Times’
sources said is happening is happening. It’s unlikely that
the Times would
fabricate a story whole cloth, so if Trump is in fact denying the
story then either the sources are lying about what they’re doing in
their own purported jobs, or Trump is still being kept in the dark,
or Trump is just lying.
“Do
you believe that the Failing New York Times just did a story stating
that the United States is substantially increasing Cyber Attacks on
Russia,” Trump tweeted. “This is a virtual act of Treason by a
once great paper so desperate for a story, any story, even if bad for
our Country. ALSO, NOT TRUE! Anything goes with our Corrupt News
Media today. They will do, or say, whatever it takes, with not even
the slightest thought of consequence! These are true cowards and
without doubt, THE ENEMY OF THE PEOPLE!”
Do you believe that the Failing New York Times just did a story stating that the United States is substantially increasing Cyber Attacks on Russia. This is a virtual act of Treason by a once great paper so desperate for a story, any story, even if bad for our Country…..
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Gebaseerd
op leugens over Venezuela en haar president Maduro, eisen CNN en de
Washington Post (WaPo) actie van Trump tegen Rusland, daar dit land
nu ook bezig is om Maduro te ondersteunen tegen de terreur van de VS,
dat hoe dan ook een verandering van regime wil doorvoeren in
Venezuela…….
Deze 2
mediaorganen, die als het overgrote deel van de reguliere westerse
media, dag in dag uit leugens brengen over Venezuela en datzelfde de
laatste paar jaar deden met de leugenbrij die men Russiagate is gaan
noemen, willen dat de VS de andere nucleaire grootmacht Rusland
aanvalt, anders kan je niet concluderen gezien wat men op de sites van CNN en WaPo heeft durven schrijven……. Het maakt deze media (plus de rest van de reguliere media) en intussen een groot deel van de westerse politiek niet uit dat een
nucleaire oorlog niet is te winnen en dat de mens voor een enorm deel
zal omkomen in zo’n oorlog…..
Je zou
toch denken dat e.e.a. niet in het belang is van het publiek dat CNN
en WaPo bedienen, het is dan ook niet het publiek dat nog bediend
moet worden door de reguliere media, nee die media bedienen de
westerse neoliberale politiek en het grote bedrijfsleven, waar vooral
het militair-industrieel complex, de oliemaffia en de georganiseerde
misdadigersbende die men de financiële sector noemt, tot de grootste
klanten kunnen worden gerekend waarvoor die media lobbyen….
De
reguliere westerse media zouden onafhankelijk moeten rapporteren,
zeker als je ziet hoe de VS de wereld haar illegale oorlogen heeft
ingelogen met hulp van die media, de enorme berg bewijzen daarvoor liggen bij
wijze van spreken voor het oprapen…… Ondanks dat blijven die
media bezig met het brengen van fake news (nepnieuws) en
desinformatie, zoals in het al genoemde ‘Russiagate’, waarover de
alternatieve media al even lang hebben bericht als zijnde een smerige
truc van het verkiezingscampagne team van Hillary Clinton om haar
misdadig gedrag verborgen te houden (het stelen van de
voorverkiezingen van Bernie Sanders…)… Nogmaals dag in dag uit
hield men de leugen vol, totdat vorige week uit Muellers onderzoek bleek dat er
van het hele Russiagate verhaal niets overeind blijft…..
CNN en WaPo maken geen rectificaties voor al de leugens die men bracht over Russiagate, nee men durft bij deze mediaorganen te stellen dat het niet optreden van Trump tegen Rusland een teken is dat er connecties zijn tussen de Trump administratie en Rusland……. Werkelijk ongelofelijk en totaal ongeloofwaardig…..
Alternatieve
media waren voor een dergelijke zaak al lang door Facebook, Twitter
en YouTube op zwart gezet, maar niet de reguliere media, die zoals
gezegd een enorme berg fake news hebben gebracht en daarmee het volk
in de VS en de rest van het westen hebben gemanipuleerd…….
Media die op basis van leugens een oorlog eisen, de wereld anno 2019……..
CNN has
aired a segment in
which pundit Fareed Zakaria tells the network’s audience that the US
president has “been unwilling to confront Putin in any way on
any issue” and asks “will Venezuela be the moment when
Trump finally ends his appeasement?”
The
segment is a near-verbatim reading of Zakaria’s Washington
Post column from
a couple of days prior, so that’s two massive prongs through which
this false and pernicious narrative is being driven into mainstream
consciousness claiming that the Trump administration has been far too
dovish toward Moscow, rather than dangerously hawkish as
is actually the case.
Zakaria
begins his segment by describing the Trump administration’s
(completely
illegitimate)
efforts to oust Venezuelan President Nicolas Maduro, then describing
Russian efforts to counter this agenda as an attempt to “taunt
the United States.” He then spends the rest of the segment
asking if Trump will be brave and patriotic enough to further
escalate tensions against a nuclear superpower. Zakaria concludes by
implying that if Trump fails to increase world-threatening nuclear
tensions to effect yet another US regime change intervention in yet
another oil-rich country, it will be because he is a Kremlin agent.
“The big question
for Washington is: Will it allow Moscow to make a mockery of another
U.S. red line?” Zakaria said. “The United States and Russia
have taken opposing, incompatible stands on this issue. And as with
Syria, there is a danger that, if Washington does not back its words
with deeds, a year from now, we will be watching the consolidation of
the Maduro regime, supported with Russian arms and money.”
Yes
Fareed, there is a real “danger” that if the Trump
administration you liberal pundits claim to oppose doesn’t act like
the reckless madman you claim he is and tempt hot war with a nuclear
superpower in order to effect regime change in a sovereign nation,
that regime change agenda will fail. Very, very dangerous
to not flirt
with nuclear war over US resource control agendas.
“The administration
has been tough on Russian involvement in Venezuela,” said
Zakaria. “Trump himself has even declared, ‘Russia has to get
out.’ But that is an unusual statement from Trump, who has almost
never criticized Putin and often sided with Russia on matters big and
small.”
Zakaria
goes on to cite the Obama administration’s ambassador to Moscow
Michael McFaul, who claimed in a Washington
Post article
that, contrary to the Trump administration’s claims of being hawkish
toward Russia, “Even on small issues of little relevance to
American national interests, Trump sides with Putin.”
“I have never
alleged collusion or conspiracy between Russia and Trump, writing
merely that we should wait to see what evidence special counsel
Robert S. Mueller III presented,” Zakaria concludes, trying to
shelter himself from the ridicule that is being directed at the
debunked Russiagate conspiracy while simultaneously promoting it.
“But the real puzzle remains: Why has Trump been unwilling to
confront Putin in any way on any issue? And will Venezuela be the
moment when Trump finally ends his appeasement?”
War
obsessed CNN pushing Trump to destroy Venezuela to prove he’s not
Putin’s bitch.
You
could not ask for a more perfect illustration of just how dangerous
and toxic this years-long Russiagate psyop has been. Even after the
Mueller investigation concludedwith
no mass arrests, no sealed indictments, no further indictments and no
evidence of Russian collusion, the mass media war propagandists are
attempting to use the Russia hysteria they’ve already manufactured
via the collusion narrative to manufacture demand for more
escalations against Russia. Fragmenting and undermining
Russia and shoving
it off the world stage has
been an agenda of opaque US government agencies since the fall
of the Soviet Union,
and steps have been taken into a new cold war to effect this
agenda for
more than five years now,
long before liberals in America spent any part of their day thinking
or caring about Vladimir Putin. Mass media outlets like CNN and WaPo
have been actively facilitating this agenda by promulgating these
false narratives, and they are playing an instrumental role in
convincing the US populace to keep their foot off the brake pedal in
an accelerating and world-threatening new cold war.
Trump
has already greatly escalated tensions with Russia by implementing a
Nuclear Posture Review with a much
more aggressive stance against Russia, withdrawing
from the INF treaty,
bombing and illegally occupying Syria, arming Ukraine, staging a coup
in Venezuela, and many,
many other hawkish actions taken
against the interests of Russia’s geostrategic and economic
interests. It is an indisputable fact that Trump has been more
aggressive toward Russia than any other president since the fall of
the Berlin wall. But the Russiagate narrative enables the war
propagandists to not only ignore these escalations and the danger
they pose to all life on earth, but to demand more and more of them.
Stephen
Cohen, one of the foremost experts on US-Russia relations in America,
made the following observation way back in April of 2017 in an
interview with Democracy
Now:
I
think this is the most dangerous moment in American-Russian
relations, at least since the Cuban missile crisis. And arguably,
it’s more dangerous, because it’s more complex. Therefore, we—and
then, meanwhile, we have in Washington these—and, in my judgment,
factless accusations that Trump has somehow been compromised by the
Kremlin. So, at this worst moment in American-Russian relations, we
have an American president who’s being politically crippled by the
worst imaginable—it’s unprecedented. Let’s stop and think. No
American president has ever been accused, essentially, of treason.
This is what we’re talking about here, or that his associates have
committed treason.
Imagine,
for example, John Kennedy during the Cuban missile crisis. And for
the viewers who are not of a certain age, the Kennedy administration
was presented—and the evidence, by the way, was presented to us;
they showed us the surveillance photos. There was no doubt what the
Soviets had done, putting missile silos in Cuba. No evidence has been
presented today of anything. Imagine if Kennedy had been accused of
being a secret Soviet Kremlin agent. He would have been crippled. And
the only way he could have proved he wasn’t was to have launched a
war against the Soviet Union. And at that time, the option was
nuclear war.
To
be clear, we came
within a hair’s breadth of
total nuclear annihilation during the Cuban Missile Crisis. Nobody
likes to think about how close we all came to losing literally
everything, and we didn’t find out exactly
how close we came until
years later, but armageddon came *this* close to happening. The
primary risk of nuclear war isn’t that one will be planned and
carried out in the hope of one side emerging victorious, it’s that
something can go cataclysmically wrong as a result of
miscommunication or misunderstanding in the midst of complex and
confusing escalating tensions. This almost happened during the Cuban
Missile Crisis.
Due
to his extensive knowledge of the dynamics in play, Cohen saw all
this coming long before anyone else, and accurately predicted the
waves of cold war escalations we’ve seen since.
Democratic
congresswoman and presidential candidate Tulsi Gabbard recently
confirmed his prediction, tweeting,
“Short-sighted politicians and media pundits who’ve spent last
two years accusing Trump as a Putin puppet have brought us the
expensive new Cold War and arms race. How? Because Trump now does
everything he can to prove he’s not Putin’s puppet—even if it
brings us closer to nuclear war.”
This is how depraved the
mass media are. They’re willing to lull the populace into complacency
with the formation of a new cold war that threatens everyone they
love, even get them demanding direct confrontation, all to please
their plutocratic owners, their military-industrial complex sponsors,
and the intelligence agencies with which they are aligned. They’re
willing to risk getting us all killed for money and crude oil.
If
we’re going to begin bringing our society and ecosystem into health,
we’re going to have to find
a way to extricate the influence of
these toxic manipulators from the minds of the greater populace. As
long as they’re able to propagandize the majority into consenting to
even the most insane omnicidal agendas, we’ll never be able to use
our superior numbers against the malignant manipulations of the few
who would rule us. Whoever
controls the narrative controls the world,
and right now it’s the evil fingers that are pulling the strings of
empire lackeys like Fareed Zakaria.
____________________________
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Alle
verhalen over Russische manipulatie van verkiezingen zijn leugens, zo
is intussen meer dan duidelijk geworden, echter de westerse (massa-)
media en het grootste deel van de westerse politiek blijven deze leugen
volhouden, immers als je een leugen dag in dag uit bij het publiek
door de strot duwt, blijft deze bij een groot deel hangen als was het
een waarheid als een koe…..
Professor Russische studies en politiek aan de Princeton
University en de New York University (NYU), Stephen Cohen ziet het anders, volgens hem is er een
kentering opgetreden en hij stelt daarbij dat juist door het hameren op die
leugens, het publiek het vertrouwen en geloof in integere politiek
verliest…. Ofwel de democratie zelf wordt aangetast met deze leugens en zoals in de
kop gesteld het ondermijnt de democratie…….
Cohen
bedoelt niet dat het (grootste deel van het) publiek doorheeft dat er
wordt gelogen, echter de verhalen over de Russische bemoeienis richt
bij dat publiek grote schade aan in het vertrouwen in de politiek….
Dit daar men zal denken dat zelfs al ‘één door de Russen gemanipuleerde of gestoken verkiezing’ zal leiden tot meer, ofwel ‘men heeft het manipuleren van de presidentsverkiezingen in 2016 niet
kunnen voorkomen’, waarom dan nu wel??
Het is al zo zot in de VS dat men het ontbreken van bewijzen voor Russische bemoeienis, wordt gezien als een bewijs voor de manipulatie die Trump in 2016 het presidentschap in de schoot heeft geworpen….. ha! ha! ha! ha! ha!
Jammer
dat Cohen niets zegt over de politiek en het gehalte aan democratie
in de VS*, immers als je niet van het christelijk
geloof bent, of je hebt niet de grote bedrijven met kapitalen achter
je staan, kan je het als kandidaat in deze immer weer gekochte
verkiezingen wel vergeten, om over alle leugens waarmee men elkaar
bestookt voorafgaand aan de verkiezingen nog maar te zwijgen, waar
men ook mensen inzet om het publiek via de sociale media (en
uiteraard via de reguliere media) te bestoken met leugens en
achterklap……… (en dan nog durven lullen over Russische inmenging……)
Ik
moet zeggen dat ik het niet met Cohen eens ben, waar hij een intellectueel uit Moskou citeert dat Russisch autoritarisme** niet door
de politiek wordt bepaald, maar door de genen (van het Russische volk)…. Je reinste kul,
hetzelfde soort gelul als het verhaal dat alle Nederlanders op klompen
lopen….. Democratie moet groeien, niet alleen in de politiek, maar
ook in het individu en gezien er van democratie nog maar kort sprake is in
Rusland (en deze als de democratie in de VS bepaald niet volmaakt is), kan je niet
stellen dat mensen niet open zouden staan voor democratie.
Het
lullige is wel dat de Russen een hoop rottigheid zien in westerse
‘democratische landen’, dit doet de lust voor democratie op z’n zachtst gezegd
geen goed…… (zie bijvoorbeeld hoe men in EU landen als
Nederland met referenda is omgesprongen…..) Waar de macht van bedrijven, geheime diensten en terreurorganisaties als de NAVO over de westerse ‘democratieën’ niet vergeten moet worden…..
Het volgende artikel van Cohen komt van The Nation (je kan daar ook 2 video’s bekijken, die ik niet kan overnemen):
Who’s
Really ‘Undermining’ American Democracy?
Allegations
that Russia is still “attacking” US elections, now again in
November, could delegitimize our democratic institutions.
Stephen
F. Cohen, professor emeritus of Russian studies and politics at NYU
and Princeton, and John Batchelor continue their (usually) weekly
discussions of the new US-Russian Cold War. (Previous installments,
now in their fifth year, are at TheNation.com.)
Summarizing
one of the themes in his new
book, War
with Russia? From Putin and Ukraine To Trump and Russiagate,
Cohen argues that Russiagate allegations of Kremlin attempts to
“undermine American democracy” may themselves erode confidence in
those institutions.
Ever
since Russiagate allegations began to appear more than two years ago,
their core narrative has revolved around purported Kremlin attempts
to “interfere” in the 2016 US presidential election on behalf of
then-candidate Donald Trump. In recent months, a number of leading
American media outlets have taken that argument even further,
suggesting that Putin’s Kremlin actually put Trump in the White
House and now is similarly trying to affect the November 6 midterm
elections, particularly House contests, on behalf of Trump and the
Republican Party. According to a page-one New
York Times “report,” for
example, Putin’s agents “are engaging in an elaborate campaign of
‘information warfare’ to interfere with the American midterm
elections.”
Despite
well-documented articles by Gareth
Porter and Aaron
Maté effectively
dismantling these allegations about 2016 and 2018, the mainstream
media continue to promote them. The occasionally acknowledged lack of
“public evidence” is sometimes cited as itself evidence of a deep
Russian conspiracy, of the Kremlin’s “arsenal of disruption
capabilities…to sow havoc on election day.” (See the
examples cited
by Alan MacLeod at
FAIR.org.)
Lost
in these reckless allegations is the long-term damage they may
themselves do to American democracy. Consider the following
possibilities.
Even
though still unproven, charges that the Kremlin put Trump in the
White House have cast a large shadow of illegitimacy over his
presidency and thus over the institution of the presidency itself.
This is unlikely to end entirely with Trump. If the Kremlin had the
power to affect the outcome of one presidential election, why not
another one, whether won by a Republican or a Democrat? The 2016
presidential election was the first time such an allegation became
widespread in American political history, but it may not be the last.
Now
the same shadow looms over the November 6 elections and thus over the
next Congress. If so, in barely two years, the legitimacy of two
fundamental institutions of American representative democracy will
have been challenged, also for the first time in history.
And
if US elections are really so vulnerable to Russian “meddling,”
what does this say about faith in American elections more generally?
How many losing candidates on November 6 will resist blaming the
Kremlin? Two years after the last presidential election, Hillary
Clinton and her adamant supporters still have not been able to do so.
We
know from critical reporting and from recent opinion surveys that the
origins and continuing fixation on the Russiagate scandal since 2016
have been primarily a product of US political-intelligence-media
elites. It did not spring from the American people—from voters
themselves. Thus a Gallup poll recently showed that 57 percent of
those surveyed wanted improved relations with Russia. And other
surveys have shown that Russiagate is scarcely an issue at all for
likely voters on November 6. Nonetheless, it remains a front-page
issue for US elites.
Indeed,
Russiagate has revealed the
low esteem that many US political-media elites have for American
voters—for
their ability to make discerning, rational electoral decisions, which
is the bedrock assumption of representative democracy. It is worth
noting that this disdain for rank-and-file citizens echoes a
longstanding attitude of the Russian political intelligentsia, as
recently expressed in the argument by a prominent Moscow policy
intellectual that Russian authoritarianism springs not from the
nation’s elites but from the “genetic
code” of its people.
US
elites seem to have a similar skepticism about—or contempt
for—American voters’ capacity to make discerning electoral
choices. Presumably this is a factor behind the current proliferation
of programs—official, corporate, and private—to introduce
elements of censorship in the nation’s “media space” in order
to filter out “Kremlin propaganda.” Here, it also seems, elites
will decide what constitutes such “propaganda.”
===========================
* Althans Cohen gaat er in dit artikel niet op in, al heeft hij het boek ‘War with Russia? From Putin and Ukraine To Trump and Russiagate’, over dit onderwerp geschreven, wellicht dat hij daarin wel ingaat op die kant van het verhaal.
** Autoritarisme is een politiek systeem dat gekenmerkt wordt door de volgende elementen: Er is geen machtsdeling: de leider of de leidende groep verenigt alle machten in één hand. Er is geen scheiding van de wetgevende, uitvoerende en rechterlijke machten, overeenkomstig het beginsel van de “Trias politica” (Wikipedia). Alsof je het over de VS hebt…..
‘Campagne Clinton, smeriger dan gedacht…………‘ (met daarin daarin opgenomen de volgende artikelen: ‘Donna Brazile Bombshell: ‘Proof’ Hillary ‘Rigged’ Primary Against Bernie‘ en ‘Democrats in Denial After Donna Brazile Says Primary Was Rigged for Hillary‘)
Professor
Stephen Cohen prikt in een interview dat Aaron Mate afnam, fijntjes door de
Putin – Trump hysterie heen, de hysterie die in de VS ontstond na het gesprek dat
Putin en Trump voerden in de Finse hoofdstad Helsinki. Men raakt er
in de VS weer niet over uitgesproken, al heeft dat alles met de reguliere, over het algemeen rechtse neoliberale pers in de VS te maken,
uiteraard aangevuld met de democratische en republikeinse politici
die openlijk lobbyen voor het militair-industrieel complex……….
Vanaf
het eind van de Sovjet-Unie tot de ontmoeting van Trump en Putin, zet
Cohen duidelijk uiteen hoe we zijn voorgelogen, bijvoorbeeld over ‘de
oorlog van Rusland tegen Georgië’, via Oekraïne, De Krim tot
Syrië…..
Voorts
moet ik Cohen gelijk geven als hij stelt dat we nu blij mogen zijn met
Trump als president, daar hij niet meegaat in de oorlogshitserij die
zoveel VS politici in hun greep houdt. Zoals op deze plek al eerder gesteld,
wat is erop tegen dat men met elkaar spreekt en probeert oorlog te
voorkomen??? Oké Trump is een beest, maar liever een beest dat niet aanvalt dan bijvoorbeeld Obama die 2 volledige termijnen in illegale oorlogsvoering was verwikkeld, zelfs 2 illegale oorlogen extra begon en veel meer bommen liet afwerpen dan Bush in 2 termijnen…….
Cohen stelt voorts terecht dat het onder eerdere
presidenten de normaalste zaak van de wereld was om te spreken met
de Russische collega’s, terwijl dat nu als verraad wordt
neergezet, alleen om Trump af te kunnen zetten en ongebreideld oorlog te kunnen voeren, zoals de VS gewend is te doen…….
Cohen gaat ook in op de beschuldiging dat Putin journalisten laat vermoorden, terwijl daar geen bewijs voor wordt geleverd, sterker nog: Cohen stelt dat deze moorden alles te maken hebben met de georganiseerde misdaad in Rusland……
Lezen mensen en geeft het door, de hoogste tijd dat we met z’n allen weer ons gezonde verstand gebruiken en ons niet langer laten voorliegen en gek laten maken door de reguliere media en het grootste deel van de politici in ons land!
Video:
Debunking the Putin Panic With Professor Stephen Cohen
(RN) — President
Trump’s warm words for Vladimir Putin and his failure to endorse
U.S. intelligence community claims about alleged Russian meddling
have been called “treasonous” and the cause of a “national
security crisis.” There
is a crisis, says Prof. Stephen F. Cohen, but one of our own making…
Part
1:
AARON
MATE: It’s
The Real News. I’m Aaron Mate.
The
White House is walking back another statement from President Trump
about Russia and U.S. intelligence. It began in Helsinki on Monday,
when at his press conference with Vladimir Putin, Trump did not
endorse the claim that Russia meddled in the 2016 election. After an
outcry that played out mostly on cable news, Trump appeared to
retract that view one day later. But then on Wednesday, Trump was
asked if he believes Russia is now targeting the U.S. ahead of the
midterms.
DONALD
TRUMP: [Thank]
you all very much. Appreciate it. Thank you. Thank you.
REPORTER: Is
Russia still targeting the U.S. [inaudible]. No, you don’t believe
that to be the case?
DONALD
TRUMP: Thank
you very much, everyone. We’re doing very well. We are doing very
well, and we’re doing very well, probably as well as anybody has
ever done with Russia. And there’s been no president ever as tough
as I have been on Russia. All you have to do is look at the numbers,
look at what we’ve done, look at sanctions, look at ambassadors.
Not there. Look, unfortunately, at what happened in Syria recently. I
think President Putin knows that better than anybody. Certainly a lot
better than the media.
AARON
MATE: The
White House later claimed that when Trump said ‘no,’ he meant no
to answering questions. But Trump’s contradiction of U.S.
intelligence claims has brought the Russiagate story, one that has
engulfed his presidency, to a fever pitch. Prominent U.S. figures
have called Trump’s comments in Helsinki treasonous, and compared
alleged Russian e-mail hacking and social media activity to 9/11 and
Pearl Harbor. Those who also question intelligence claims or
warmongering with Russia have been dubbed traitors, or Kremlin
agents.
Speaking
to MSNBC, the former U.S. ambassador to Russia Michael McFaul
declared that with Trump’s comments, the U.S. is in the midst of a
national security crisis.
MICHAEL
MCFAUL: Republicans
need to step up. They need to speak out, not just the familiar
voices, because this is a national security crisis, and the president
of the United States flew all the way to Finland, met with Vladimir
Putin, and basically capitulated. It felt like appeasement.
AARON
MATE: Well,
joining me to address this so-called national security crisis is
Stephen Cohen, professor emeritus at New York University and
Princeton University. His books include “Failed Crusade: America
and the Tragedy of Post-Soviet Russia,” and “Soviet Fates and
Lost Alternatives: From Stalinism to the New Cold War.” Professor
Cohen, welcome. I imagine that you might agree with the view that we
are in the midst of a national security crisis when it comes to
Russia, but for far different reasons than those expounded on by
Ambassador McFaul.
STEPHEN
COHEN: There is a national security crisis, and there is a
Russian threat. And we, we ourselves here in the United States, have
created both of them. This has been true for years, and now it’s
reached crisis proportion. Notice what’s going on. A mainstream TV
reporter shouts to President Trump, “Are the Russians still
targeting our elections?” This is in the category “Are you still
beating your wife?” There is no proof that the Russians have
targeted or attacked our elections. But it’s become axiomatic. What
kind of media is that, are the Russians still, still attacking our
elections.
And
what Michael McFaul, whom I’ve known for years, formerly Ambassador
McFaul, purportedly a scholar and sometimes a scholar said, it is
simply the kind of thing, to be as kind as I can, that I heard from
the John Birch Society about President Eisenhower when he went to
meet Khrushchev when I was a kid growing up in Kentucky. This is
fringe discourse that never came anywhere near the mainstream before,
at least after Joseph McCarthy, that the president went, committed
treason, and betrayed the country. Trump
may have not done the right thing at the summit, because agreements
were reached. Nobody discusses the agreements. But to stage a
kangaroo trial of the president of the United States in the
mainstream media, and have plenty of once-dignified people come on
and deliver the indictment, is without precedent in this country.
And it has created a national crisis in our relations with Russia. So
yes, there’s a national crisis.
AARON
MATE: Let
me play for you a clip from Trump’s news conference with Putin that
also drew outrage back in the U.S. When he was asked about the state
of U.S.-Russia relations, he said both sides had responsibility.
DONALD
TRUMP: Yes,
I do. I hold both countries responsible. I think that the United
States has been foolish. I think we’ve all been foolish. We should
have had this dialogue a long time ago. A long time, frankly, before
I got to office. And I think we’re all to blame. I think that the
United States now has stepped forward, along with Russia, and we’re
getting together, and we have a chance to do some great things.
Whether it’s nuclear proliferation, in terms of stopping, because
we have to do it. Ultimately that’s probably the most important
thing that we can be working on.
AARON
MATE: That’s
President Trump in Helsinki. Professor Cohen, I imagine that this
comment probably was part of the reason why there was so much
outrage, not Just of what Trump said about the claims of Russian
meddling in the election. Can you talk about the significance of what
he said here, and how it contradicts the, the entire consensus of the
bipartisan foreign policy establishment?
STEPHEN
COHEN: I
did not vote for President Trump. But for that I salute him, what he
just said. So far as I can remember, no wiser words or more important
words have been spoken by the American president about Russia and the
Soviet Union since Ronald Reagan did his great detente with Mikhail
Gorbachev in the late 1980s. What
Trump just did, and I don’t- we never know, Aaron, how aware he is
of the ramifications of what he says. But in this case, whether he
fully understood it or not, he just broke with, and the first time
any major political figure in the United States has broken with the
orthodoxy, ever since at least 2000. And
even going back to the ’90s. That all the conflicts we’ve had
with post-Soviet Russia, after communism went away in Russia, all
those conflicts, which I call a new and more dangerous Cold War, are
solely, completely, the fault of Putin or Putin’s Russia.That
nothing in American policy since Bill Clinton in the 1990s did
anything to contribute seriously to the very dangerous conflict,
confrontation we have with Russia today. It was all Russia’s fault.
What
that has meant, and you know this, Aaron, because you live in this
world as well,it
has meant no media or public dialogue about the merits of American
policy toward post-Soviet Russia from Clinton, certainly through
Obama. It
may be changing now under President Trump. Not sure. It means if we
don’t have a debate, we’re not permitted to ask, did we do
something wrong, or so unwise that it led to this even more dangerous
Cold War? And
if the debate leads to a conclusion that we did do something unwise,
and that we’re still doing it, then arises the pressure and the
imperative for any new policy toward Russia. None of that has been
permitted, because the orthodoxy, the dogma, the axiom, is Putin
alone has solely been responsible.
So
you know, you know as well as I do what is excluded. It doesn’t
matter that we moved NATO to Russia’s borders, that’s not
significant. Or that we bombed Serbia, Russia’s traditional ally.
Or that George Bush left the Antiballistic Missile Treaty, which was
the bedrock of Russian nuclear security and, I would argue, our own.
Or that we did regime change by military might in Iraq and Libya, and
many other things. Or that we provoked the Ukrainian crisis in 2004,
and supported the coup that overthrew a legitimate, elected,
constitutional president there. None of that matters. Oh, it was kind
of footnotes to the real narrative. And the narrative is, is that a
Russian leader Vladimir Putin in power was a horrible aggressor.
Killed everybody, somehow, with secret poisons or thieves in the
night who opposed him. And began this new cold or even worse war with
the United States.
No
historian of any merit will ever write the story that way. It’s
factually, analytically, simply untrue. Now Trump has said something
radically different. We got here in these dire circumstances because
both sides acted unwisely, and we should have had this discussion a
long time ago.
So for that, two cheers for President Trump. But whether he can
inspire the discussion that he may wish to, considering the fact that
he’s now being indicted as a criminal for having met Putin, is a
big question.
AARON
MATE: So
a few questions. You mentioned that some agreements were made, but
details on that have been vague. So do you have any sense of what
concretely came out of this summit? There was talk about cooperation
on nuclear weapons, possibly renewing the New START Treaty. We know
that Putin offered that to Trump when he first came into office, but
Trump rejected it. There was talk about cooperating in Syria. And,
well, yeah, if I can put that question to you first, and then I have
a follow-up about what might be motivating Trump here. But first,
what do you think concretely came out of this?
STEPHEN
COHEN: Well,
look, I know a lot, both as a historian, and I’ve actually
participated in some about the history of American-Russian,
previously Soviet, summits. Which, by the way, this is the 75th
anniversary of the very first one, when Franklin Roosevelt traveled
to Tehran to meet Stalin. And
every president, and this is important to emphasize, every president
since
Roosevelt
has met with the Kremlin leader. Some many times, or several times.
So there’s a long tradition. And therefore there are customs. And
one custom, this goes to your question, is that never, except maybe
very rarely, but almost never do we learn the full extent and nature
of what agreements were made. That
usually comes in a week or two or three later, because there’s
still the teams of both are hammering out the details.
So
that’s exactly what happened at this summit. There was no
conspiracy. No, you know, appeasement behind closed doors. The two
leaders announced in general terms what they agreed upon. Now,
the most important, and this is traditional, too, by meeting they
intended to revive the diplomatic process between the United States
and Russia which has been badly tattered by events including the
exclusion of diplomats, and sanctions, and the rest. So to get
active, vigorous diplomacy about many issues going. They
may not achieve that goal, because the American media and the
political mainstream is trying to stop that. Remember that anything
approaching diplomatic negotiations with Russia still less detente,
is now being criminalized in the United States. Criminalized. What
was once an honorable tradition, the pursuit of detente, is now a
capital crime, if we believe these charges against Trump.
So
they tried to revive that process, and we’ll see if it’s going to
be possible. I think at least behind the scenes it will be. Obviously
what you mentioned, both sides now have new, more elusive, more
lethal, faster, more precise nuclear weapons. We’ve been developing
them for a long time in conjunction with missile defense. We’ve
essentially been saying to Russia, you may have equality in nuclear
weapons with us, but we have missile defense. Therefore, we could use
missile defense to take out your retaliatory capacity. That is, we
could stage the first strike on you and you would not be able to
retaliate.
Now,
everybody who’s lived through the nuclear era knows that’s an
invitation to disaster. Because like it or not, we’ve lived with a
doctrine called MAD, Mutual Assured Destruction, that one side dare
not attack the other with a nuclear weapon because it would be
destroyed as well. We were saying we now have this primacy. Putin,
then, on March 1 of this year, announced that they have developed
weapons that can elude missile defense. And it seems to be true. In
the air and at sea, their dodgy, darty, quick thing- but they could
avoid our missile defense. So where we are at now is on the cusp of a
new nuclear arms race involving more dangerous nuclear weapons. And
the current START, New START Treaty will expire, I think, in three or
four years. But its expiration date is less important that the
process of talking and negotiating and worrying officially about
these new weapons had ended.
So
essentially what Trump and Putin agreed is that process of concern
about new and more dangerous nuclear weapons must now resume
immediately. And if there’s anybody living in the United States who
think that that is a bad idea they need to reconsider their life,
because they may be looking into the darkness of death. So
that was excellent. Briefly.
What
I hope they did- they didn’t announce it, but I’m pretty sure
they did- that there had been very close calls between American and
Russian combat forces and their proxies in Syria. We’re doing a
proxy war, but there are plenty of native Russians and Americans in
Syria in a relatively small combat cell. And there have been
casualties. The Russians have said at the highest level the next time
a Russian is killed in Syria by an American-based weapon, we will
strike the American launcher. If Russia strikes our launching pads or
areas, whether on land or sea, which means Americans will be there
and are killed, call it war. Call it war.
So
we need to agree in Syria to do more than, what do they call it,
deconfliction, where we have all these warnings. It’s
still too much space for mishap. And what I hope it think Trump and
Putin did was to try to get a grip on this.
AARON
MATE: Stephen
F. Cohen, professor emeritus at at Princeton University and New York
University, thank you. And stay tuned for part two. I’m Aaron Mate
for The Real News.
*
* *
There
is much to criticize the Russian president for, says Professor
Stephen F. Cohen of Princeton and NYU, but
many US political and media claims about Putin are false – and
reckless…
Part
2:
AARON
MATE: It’s
The Real News. I’m Aaron Mate. This is part two with Stephen Cohen,
professor emeritus of Russian studies at New York University and
Princeton. In part one we talked about the uproar over the
Trump-Putin summit, and Trump’s comments about the U.S.
intelligence community and about cooperation with Russia. Now
in part two we’re going to get to some of the main talking points
that have been pervasive throughout corporate media, talking about
the stated reasons for why pundits and politicians say they are
opposed to Trump sitting down with Putin.
So
let me start with Jon Meacham. He is a historian. And speaking to
CNN, he worried that Trump, with his comments about NATO calling on
the alliance to pay more, and calling into question, he worried about
the possibility that Trump won’t come to the aid of Baltic states
in the event that Russia invades.
JON
MEACHAM: And
what worries me most is the known unknown, as Donald Rumsfeld might
put it, of what happens next. Let’s say Putin- just look at this
whole week of the last five, six days in total. What happens if Putin
launches military action against, say, the Baltics? What, what is it
that President Trump, what about his comments that NATO suggest thar
he would follow an invocation of Article 5 and actually project
American force in defense of the values that not only do we have an
intellectual and moral assent to, but a contractual one, a treaty
one. I think that’s the great question going forward.
AARON
MATE: OK.
So that’s Jon Meacham speaking to CNN. So, Professor Cohen, putting
aside what he said there about our intellectual values and strong
tradition, just on the issue of Trump, of Putin posing a potential
threat and possibly invading the Baltics, is that a realistic
possibility?
STEPHEN
COHEN: So,
I’m not sure what you’re asking me about. The folly of NATO
expansion? The fact that every president in my memory has asked the
Europeans to pay more? But can we be real? Can we be real? The only
country that’s attacked that region of Europe militarily since the
end of the Soviet Union was the United States of America. As I
recall, we bombed Serbia, a, I say this so people understand, a
traditional Christian country, under Bill Clinton, bombed Serbia for
about 80 days. There is no evidence that Russia has ever bombed a
European country.
You
tell me, Aaron. You must be a smart guy, because you got your own
television show. Why
would Putin want to launch a military attack and occupy the Baltics?
So he has to pay the pensions there? Which he’s having a hard time
already paying in Russia, and therefore has had to raise the pension
age, and thereby lost 10 percentage points of popularity in two
weeks? Why
in the world can we, can we simply become rational people. Why in the
world would Russia want to attack and occupy Latvia, Lithuania, and
Estonia? The only reason I can think of is that many, many of my
friends love to take their summer vacations there. And maybe some
crazy person thinks that if we occupy it, vacations will be cheaper.
It’s crazy. It’s beyond crazy. It’s a kind-.
AARON
MATE: Professor
Cohen, if you were on CNN right now I imagine that the anchor would
say to you, well, okay, but one could say the same thing about
Georgia in 2008. Why did Russia attack Georgia then?
STEPHEN
COHEN: I’m not aware that Russia attacked Georgia. The
European Commission, if you’re talking about the 2008 war, the
European Commission, investigating what happened, found that Georgia,
which was backed by the United States, fighting with an
American-built army under the control of the, shall we say, slightly
unpredictable Georgian president then, Saakashvili, that
he began the war by firing on Russian enclaves. And the Kremlin,
which by the way was not occupied by Putin, but by Michael McFaul and
Obama’s best friend and reset partner then-president Dmitry
Medvedev, did what any Kremlin leader, what any leader in any country
would have had to do: it reacted. It sent troops across the border
through the tunnel, and drove the Georgian forces out of what
essentially were kind of Russian protectorate areas of Georgia.
So
that- Russia didn’t begin that war. And
it didn’t begin the one in Ukraine, either. We did that by
[continents], the overthrow of the Ukrainian president in [20]14
after President Obama told Putin that he would not permit that to
happen. And I think it happened within 36 hours. The
Russians, like them or not, feel that they have been lied to and
betrayed. They use this word, predatl’stvo, betrayal, about
American policy toward Russia ever since 1991, when
it wasn’t just President George Bush, all the documents have been
published by the National Security Archive in Washington, all the
leaders of the main Western powers promised the Soviet Union that
under Gorbachev, if Gorbachev would allow a reunited Germany to be
NATO, NATO would not, in the famous expression, move two inches to
the east.
Now
NATO is sitting on Russia’s borders from the Baltic to Ukraine. So
Russians aren’t fools, and they’re good-hearted, but they become
resentful. They’re worried about being attacked by the United
States. In fact, you read and hear in the Russian media daily, we are
under attack by the United States. And
this is a lot more real and meaningful than this crap that is being
put out that Russia somehow attacked us in 2016. I must have been
sleeping. I didn’t see Pearl Harbor or 9/11 and 2016. This is
reckless, dangerous, warmongering talk. It needs to stop. Russia has
a better case for saying they’ve been attacked by us since 1991. We
put our military alliance on the front door. Maybe it’s not an
attack, but it looks like one, feels like one. Could be one.
AARON
MATE: OK.
And in a moment I want to speak to you more about Ukraine, because
we’ve heard Crimea invoked a lot in the criticism of Putin of late.
But first I want to actually to ask you about a domestic issue. This
one is it’s widely held that Putin is responsible for the killing
of journalists and opposition activists who oppose him. And on this
front I want to play for you a clip of Joe Cirincione. He is the head
of the Ploughshares Fund. And this is what he said this week in an
appearance on Democracy Now!.
JOE
CIRINCIONE: Both
of these men are dangerous. Both of these men oppress basic human
rights, basic freedoms. Both of them think the press are the enemy of
the people. Putin goes further. He kills journalists. He has them
assassinated on the streets of Moscow.
Donald
Trump does not go that far yet. But I think what Putin is doing is
using the president of the United States to project his rule, to
increase his power, to carry out his agenda in Syria, with Europe, et
cetera, and that Trump is acquiescing to that for reasons that are
not yet clear.
AARON
MATE: That’s
Joe Cirincione.
STEPHEN
COHEN: I
know him well. It’s worse than that. It’s worse than that.
AARON
MATE: Well
Yes. There’s two issues here, Professor Cohen. One is the state of
the crackdown on press freedoms in Russia, which I’m sure you would
say is very much alive, and is a strong part of the Russian system.
But let’s first address this widely-held view that Putin is
responsible for killing journalists who are critical of him.
STEPHEN
COHEN: I
know I’m supposed to follow your lead, but I think you’re
skipping over a major point. How
is it that Joe, who was once one of our most eminent and influential,
eloquent opponents of nuclear arms race, who was prepared to have the
president of the United States negotiate with every Soviet communist
leader, including those who had a lot of blood on their hands, now
decide that Putin kills everybody and he’s not a worthy partner?
What happened to Joe?
I’ll
tell you what happened to him. Trump. Trump has driven once-sensible
people completely crazy. Moreover, Joe knows absolutely nothing about
internal Russian politics, and
he ought to follow my rule. When I don’t know something about
something, I say I don’t know. But what he just said is ludicrous.
And the sad part is-.
AARON
MATE: But
it’s widely held. If it’s ludicrous-. But widely held, yeah.
STEPHEN
COHEN: Well,
the point is that once
distinguished and important spokespeople for rightful causes, like
ending a nuclear arms race, have been degraded, or degraded
themselves by saying things like he said to the point that they’re
of utility today only to the proponents of a new nuclear arms race.
And he’s not alone. Somebody called it Trump derangement
syndrome. I’m
not a psychiatrist, but it’s a widespread mania across our land.
And when good people succumb to it, we are all endangered.
AARON
MATE: But
many people would be surprised to hear that, because again, the
stories that we get, and there are human rights reports, and it’s
just sort of taken as a given fact that Putin is responsible for
killing journalists. So if that’s ludicrous, if you can explain why
you think that is.
STEPHEN
COHEN: Well, I
got this big problem which seems to afflict very few people in public
life anymore. I live by facts. I’m
like my doctor, who told me not long ago I had to have minor surgery
for a problem I didn’t even know I had. And I said, I’m not going
to do it. Show me the facts. And he did. I had the minor
surgery. Journalists
no longer seem to care about facts. They repeat tabloid rumors. Putin
kills everybody.
All
I can tell you is this. I
have never seen any evidence whatsoever, and I’ve been- I knew some
of the people who were killed. Anna
Politkovskaya, the famous journalist for Novaya Gazeta was the first,
I think, who was- Putin was accused of killing. I knew her well. She
was right here, in this apartment. Look behind me, right here. She
was here with my wife, Katrina vanden Huevel. I wouldn’t say we
were close friends, but we were associates in Moscow, and we were
social friends. And
I mourn her assassination today. But I will tell you this, that
neither her editors at that newspaper, nor her family, her surviving
sons, think Putin had anything to do with the killing. No
evidence has ever been presented. Only media kangaroo courts that
Putin was involved in these high-profile assassinations, two of the
most famous being this guy Litvinenko by polonium in London, about
the time Anna was killed, and more recently Boris Netsov, whom, it’s
always said, was walking within view of the Kremlin when he was shot.
Well, you could see the Kremlin from miles away. I don’t know what
within the view- unless they think Putin was, you know, watching it
through binoculars. There is no evidence that Putin ever ordered the
killing of anybody outside his capacity as commander in chief. No
evidence.
Now,
did he? But we live, Aaron, and I hope the folks who watch us
remember this. Every professional person, every decent person lives
or malpractices based on verified facts. You go down the wrong way on
a one-way street, you might get killed. You take some medication
that’s not prescribed for you, you might die. You pursue foreign
policies based on fiction, you’re likely to get in war. And
all these journalists, from the New York Times to the Washington
Post, from MSNBC to CNN who churn out daily these allegations that
Putin kills people are disgracing themselves. I
will give you one fact. Wait. One fact, and you could look it up, as
Casey Stengel used to say. He was a baseball manager, in case you
don’t know.
There’s
an organization called the Committee to Protect American Journalists.
It’s kind of iconic. It does good things, it says unwise things. Go
on its website and look at the number of Russian journalists killed
since 1991, since the end of the Soviet Union, under two leaders.
Boris Yeltsin, whom we dearly loved and still mourn, and Putin, whom
we hate.Last
time I looked, the numbers may have changed, more were killed under
Yeltsin than under Putin. Did Putin kill those in the 1990s?
So
you should ask me, why did they die, then? And
I can tell you the main reason. Corrupt business. Mafia-like business
in Russia. Just like happened in the United States during our
primitive accumulation days. Profit
seekers killed rivals. Killed them dead in the streets. Killed them
as demonstrations, as demonstrative acts. The only thing you could
say about Putin is that he might have created an atmosphere that
abets that sort of thing. To which I would say, maybe, but originally
it was created with the oligarchical class under Boris Yeltsin, who
remains for us the most beloved Russian leader in history. So that’s
the long and the short of it. Go look at the listing on the Committee
to Protect Journalists.
AARON
MATE: OK.
So, following up on that, to what extent- and this gets a bit into
history, which you’ve covered extensively in your writings. To what
extent are we here in the West responsible for the creation of that
Russian oligarchal class that you mentioned? But also, what is
Putin’s relationship to it now, today? Does he abet it? Is he
entrenched in it? We hear, often, talk of Putin possibly being the
richest person in the world as a result of his entanglement with the
very corruption of Russia you’re speaking about. So both our role
in creating that problem in Russia, but then also Putin’s role now
in terms of his relationship to it.
STEPHEN
COHEN: I’m
going to give you a quick, truncated, scholarly, historical
perspective on this. But this is what people should begin with when
they think about Vladimir Putin and his 18 years in power. Putin came
to power almost accidentally in 2000. He inherited a country whose
state had collapsed twice in the 20th century. You’ve got to think
about that. How
many states have collapsed that you know of once? But the Russian
state, Russian statehood, had collapsed once in 1917 during the
revolution, and again in 1991 when the Soviet Union ended. The
country was in ruination; 75 percent of the people were in poverty.
Putin
said- and this obsesses him. If you want to know what obsesses Putin,
it’s the word ‘sovereignty.’ Russia lost its sovereignty-
political, foreign policy, security, financial- in the 1990s. Putin
saw his mission, as I read him, and I try to read him as a
biographer. He says a lot, to regain Russia’s sovereignty, which
meant to make the country whole again at home, to rescue its people,
and to protect its defenses. That’s been his mission. Has it been
more than that? Maybe. But everything he’s done, as I see it, has
followed that concept of his role in history. And he’s done pretty
well.
Now,
I can give you all Putin’s minuses very easily. I would not care
for him to be my president. But let me tell you one other thing
that’s important. You evaluate nations within their own history,
not within ours. If
you asked me if Putin is a democrat, and I will answer you two ways.
He thinks he has. And compared to what? Compared to the leader of
Egypt? Yeah, he is a democrat. Compared to the rulers of our pals in
the Gulf states, he is a democrat. Compared to Bill Clinton? No, he’s
not a Democrat. I mean, Russia-. Countries are on their own
historical clock. And you have to judge Putin in terms of his
predecessors. So people think Putin is a horrible leader. Did you
prefer Brezhnev? Did you prefer Stalin? Did you prefer Andropov?
Compared to what? Please tell me, compared to what.
And
by the way, that’s how that’s how Russians-. You want to know why
he’s so popular in Russia? Because Russians judge him in the
context of their own what they call zhivaya istoriya, living history;
what we call autobiography. In
terms of their own lives, he looks pretty darn good. They complain
out him. We sit in the kitchen and they bitch about Putin all the
time. But they don’t want him to go away.
AARON
MATE: All
right. Well, on that front, we’re going to wrap this up there.
Stephen Cohen, professor emeritus of Russian studies at New York
University and Princeton. His books include “Failed Crusade:
America and the Tragedy of Post-Soviet Russia,” and “Soviet Fates
and Lost Alternatives: From Stalinism to the New Cold War.”
Professor Cohen, thank you.
STEPHEN
COHEN: You
forgot one book.
AARON
MATE: I
did not say I was reading your, your complete bibliography.
STEPHEN
COHEN: It’s
called-. It’s called “Confessions of a Holy Fool.”
AARON
MATE: Is
that true? Or are you making a joke.
STEPHEN
COHEN: Somewhere
in between. [Thank you, Aaron.]
AARON
MATE: Professor
Cohen, thank you. And thank you for joining us on The Real News.
January 01, 2020
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