Exceptionalism, Imperialism, and Morality

Thoughts on the 248th birthday of the United States

by Robert Malone / July 4th, 2024

It is our true policy to steer clear of permanent alliance with any portion of the foreign world.
— George Washington, Farewell Address to the People of the United States, 19 September 1796

American Exceptionalism

There is an argument that, from post-WWII to the present, international relations and the state of the world would be in a far worse condition except for the actions and forces of the United States’ foreign and military policy. Despite this or that excess, transgression, strategic blunder, or self-serving activity of post-war American international activities, the United States has been a force for good throughout the world, and the US-led North Atlantic Treaty Organization plays a vital role in maintaining that peace and order. Absent benign American international force and leadership, the era of Pax Americana would have been one of turbulent conflicts, during which the evils of economic and social Marxism would have resulted in global misery and strife. The United States is exceptional for a variety of reasons, of which its commitments to universally promoting justice, freedom, democracy, and human rights- all grounded in a commitment to the rule of law based on a constitution that is predicated on the thesis that all men are created equal and have fundamental, inalienable rights. These characteristics have made the USA an exemplar of a “shining city on the hill” for all peoples and nations.  That the 20th century actually was the American century.

Unfortunately, this train of thought has developed into a general sense of arrogant entitlement on the part of the US military/intelligence complex (security or deep state). Essentially, that the US is so powerful that it can do what it wants, in a unilateral manner, to advance the foreign and domestic policy agendas which have been developed without taking into account the perspectives and opinions of others. Policy positions grounded in a dangerous and counterproductive narcissistic immaturity, otherwise known as Neoconservatism.  Full spectrum US global dominance.

The counterpoint to the narrative of American exceptionalism is usually some version of the narrative that after WWII, the United States just stepped into the power vacuum left by the failed British and European empires and has primarily acted as a disingenuous, hegemonic, self-serving imperialistic global superpower. One whose actions mainly support the interests of its large corporations, oligarchs, and associated industries. Or that the United States is the great Satan if one accepts the simplified demagoguery of the Iranian Islamic State and its surrogates.

Imperialism

These opposing alternative narratives share one common feature. Both agree that after WWII, the United States became an imperialistic superpower. This truth is self-evident. George Washington’s simple, mature wisdom was jettisoned for imperial dreams.

But of course it has, the argument goes, because of the post-WWII power vacuum, some nation-state had to provide global leadership, enforce peace, law, and order (“policeman to the world”), expand “democracy,” facilitate trade and commerce, and provide a common currency (“petrodollar”).  If not the United States, then what other country would lead opposition to and contain the expansionism of Russian, Chinese, Islamic, or <fill in the blank> nation-states.  The logic goes that this is what nation-states do.  They seek power and territory.  They interfere with the internal affairs of their rivals.  Seen through the lens of Austrian economic anarcho-capitalist theory, nation-states are akin to predatory warlords grown large enough to develop a veneer of legitimacy and act accordingly.  And so, realistically (“realpolitik”), if not for the guiding hand of benign United States Imperialism, a chain of chaos and communist dominoes would fall.  If not us, then who?

Let’s wind back in time to 1648, the foundation of the modern system of nation-states, the “Thirty Years War,” and the “Treaty of Westphalia.”

The Thirty Years’ War was a devastating conflict that lasted from 1618 to 1648. It involved many European countries, including the Holy Roman Empire, Sweden, France, and the Dutch Republic. The war was fought over issues of religion, politics, and territory, and it caused widespread destruction and loss of life.

The Treaty of Westphalia consisted of two primary documents: the Peace Treaty of Osnabrück and the Peace Treaty of Münster. The key provisions of the treaties included:

• The recognition of the independence of the Dutch Republic and the Swedish Empire.
• The principle of sovereignty was established, which held that each state had the right to govern itself and make its own decisions.
• The recognition of the right of each state to choose its own religion and to enter into alliances with other states.
• Establishing a system of international relations based on diplomacy and negotiation rather than war and conquest.

The Treaty of Westphalia is considered one of the most important treaties in European history. It marked a turning point in the development of international relations, and it established a new system of diplomacy and negotiation that would last for centuries. The treaty also had a profound impact on the development of modern nation-states.

Now, fast-forward to the post-WWII period of United States foreign and domestic policy and the “American Exceptionalism” Neoconservative justification for American Imperialism. Consider the argument, “If not us, then who?”

Functionally, who is the “us” in this case, who acts as the guiding hand of United States Imperialism?  The answer is the “deep state”, ergo the national security apparatus, with the CIA being at the center of that bureaucratic matrix.  After WWII, the deep state and CIA were developed into the present form to functionally operate as a private army of the President. The principle tasks achieved by the deep state have largely involved toppling other governments via CIA-led covert operations. In other words, interfering with the internal affairs of other nation-states in the most blatant manner.  Completely contrary to the most fundamental principles of the Westphalian nation-state system.

What is the “deep state”? The President, National Security Council, intelligence agencies, Pentagon leadership, a handful of major military contractors, and the congressional armed services committees.  Over 70 regime change operations were authorized and managed by the deep state between 1947 and 1989, 64 of which were “covert,” as documented in the book “Covert Regime Change” by Lindsey O’Rourke.  Covert change of foreign nation-state governments is what the deep state does.

Unfortunately, for my happiness, peace of mind, and ability to accept this narrative, my eyes are now opened to the current reality of an American nation-state “managed” by techno-bureaucrats who are functionally led by a small, self-serving, corrupt elite, which is what the “deep state” (or blob) has become.  A rogue branch of the United States federal government administrative state that routinely manipulates citizens to accept questionable management decisions by deploying propaganda, censorship, and psychological operations technologies.  One which seems to pay lip service to its founding principles and no longer respects its own laws.  An elite that no longer believes in the concept of sovereign nation-states, and now seeks to substitute a new system of globalized governance led by appointed “leaders” who are closely allied and aligned with very large transnational corporate interests.

This leads me to ponder how we got to this point and what can be done about it.

In his “Farewell Address,” George Washington warned against the dangers of foreign entanglements. He emphasized the importance of avoiding permanent alliances with foreign nations and instead advised reliance on temporary alliances for emergencies. Why?

Washington believed that permanent alliances with foreign nations could lead to:

• Loss of Independence: The United States risked losing its independence and autonomy by becoming entangled in foreign affairs.
• Financial Burden: Permanent alliances could lead to significant financial burdens, as the United States would be obligated to provide military and economic support to its allies.
• Distrust and Mistrust: Permanent alliances could also lead to suspicion and mistrust among nations, as each side would be wary of the other’s intentions.

His advice to the new nation was to:

• Avoid Permanent Alliances: Washington recommended forming temporary alliances for specific emergencies or crises instead of permanent alliances.
• Focus on Domestic Affairs: Washington believed that the United States should focus on its domestic affairs and prioritize its interests rather than becoming entangled in foreign affairs.
• Maintain Neutrality: Washington advocated for maintaining neutrality in international conflicts, avoiding involvement in foreign wars and instead focusing on promoting peace and stability through diplomacy.

Fundamentally,  George Washington was a mature, pragmatic nationalist.  In today’s language, he would probably be labeled an isolationist and a far-right populist.

One of many alternative hypotheses is that the current state of US foreign and domestic affairs is the logical consequence of a decades-long slide down a slippery slope with no limits.  There are no limits to the slope and the slide because the United States has scrapped morality for the siren song of utilitarianism—the greatest good for the greatest number.  Ends justify the means.  Realpolitik.  And increasingly, socialism and cultural Marxism.

As is often the case, choices have short and long-term consequences.

The decision to disregard Washington’s advice and travel down the path of imperialism may have been easy to justify when the opportunity presented, as the world surrounding the United States lay in disarray. Still, it has come at a steep price.  Over the short term, imperialism brought enormous benefits to the homeland, as it always does (at first).  Unprecedented economic benefits, expansion of the middle class, and a standard of living that has been the envy of the world were enabled significantly by importing wealth and resources from other sovereign nation-states.  Augmented by innovation, fueled by freedom of thought (and speech) combined with a work ethic forged in self-reliant, can-do frontier culture.  But the long-term price paid has been the soul of the nation.

Morality

Many, including myself, are uncomfortable with imperialism. Interfering in the internal affairs of sovereign foreign nations is not ethical. This stems, in part, from having internalized the fundamental principles of the Treaty of Westphalia. Although I was never taught this in high school civics, the US Constitution is built upon the principles of the Treaty of Westphalia. Indeed, George Washington understood these principles.

Globalism feels wrong to me, in part because globalist theory basically rejects the Treaty of Westphalia and the logic of a decentralized network of sovereign and autonomous nation-states, substituting a single global government in its place.

It seems self-evident that Imperialism is fundamentally inconsistent with the principles of the Treaty of Westphalia.  In particular, the principle of sovereignty is that each state has the right to govern itself and make its own decisions.

In the European power vacuum that followed WWII, the US diplomatic corps and intelligence community reached a consensus that it was acceptable to actively interfere in other nation-states’ affairs using various covert “active measures,” otherwise commonly known as dirty tricks. These measures were designed to mitigate short-term risks to US foreign policy objectives. However, actions have short—and long-term consequences, which are often unpredictable.

For example, a case can be made that the British and US-instigated 1953 Iranian coup d’etat, which was primarily performed to safeguard the interests of British oil interests in Iran and overthrew the elected Prime Minister Mosaddegh in favor of the shah (Palavi), eventually resulted in the Iranian revolution and the birth of the Iranian Islamic state. Blowback on a grand scale.

Once the moral line had been crossed and active measures to interfere in the internal affairs of sovereign nation-states justified in the name of US foreign policy, then the classical incremental logic of all bureaucratic administrative states was set loose. Covert active measures lead to more covert active measures, leading to justifying election interference, overthrowing duly elected “democratic” governments, and assassinations of foreign leaders, all in the name of protecting US foreign interests. And, I suggest, from there, it was only a short step to justifying an American coup involving the assassination of a US President. All to defend the foreign and domestic policy objectives of a post-war permanent shadow US leadership. The primacy of the deep state.

Which brings us to the present, where it seems that anything goes. All is fair in love, war, and politics. Including imprisoning your political enemies. If voting manipulation is acceptable offshore to defend policy objectives, why not domestically? If deploying psychological warfare against offshore opponents is acceptable, then deploying the same technology, strategies, and tactics against citizens is acceptable because the ends justify the means.

I must be naïve because I think that George Washington got it right. We should avoid foreign entanglements.  Tend to our garden and let others tend to theirs because no one can see into the future. Because actions have unintended long-term consequences. Because it is the right thing to do.

Morality is a strange thing. Once compromised, further compromises become inevitable because there is always some argument to justify short-term self-interest—the slippery slope. Recognition of this truth is a sign of maturity, and outsiders often see the United States post-WWI actions and foreign policy positions as immature. Neoconservatism is an immature, narcissistic policy stance.  The United States Government must return to a commitment to its founding principles, to the rule of law, and to a firm, unwavering commitment to the core principles often referred to as Judeo-Christian morality, the values which are rooted in the Hebrew Bible (Old Testament) and the New Testament. These include:

• Respect for human life: Both Judaism and Christianity teach that human life is sacred and should be protected.
• Justice and fairness: Both traditions emphasize the importance of treating others fairly.
• Love and compassion: Both Judaism and Christianity teach the importance of loving and showing compassion to others.
• Honesty and integrity: Both traditions emphasize the importance of honesty and integrity in one’s words and actions.
• Respect for authority: Both Judaism and Christianity teach the importance of respecting authority and submitting to God’s will.

Today, we should celebrate the founding of the United States. But let’s do so with a realistic understanding of what we have become, how far we have strayed from our fundamental principles and morality, and what we must do to Make America Great Again.

Robert W Malone MD, MS is president of the Malone Institute whose mission is to bring back integrity to the biological sciences and medicine. The Malone Institute supports and conducts research, education, and informational activities. Contact: info@maloneinstitute.org. Read other articles by Robert, or visit Robert's website.

 

Public fails to appreciate risk of consuming raw milk, survey finds

AMERICAN EXCEPTIONALISM:

Under half of Americans know raw milk is less safe to drink than pasteurized milk

ANNENBERG PUBLIC POLICY CENTER OF THE UNIVERSITY OF PENNSYLVANIA

 

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LESS THAN HALF OF THOSE SURVEYED (47%) SAY RAW MILK IS LESS SAFE TO DRINK THAN PASTEURIZED MILK. FROM AN ANNENBERG PUBLIC POLICY CENTER SURVEY OF 1,031 U.S. ADULTS IN JUNE 2024.

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CREDIT: ANNENBERG PUBLIC POLICY CENTER

PHILADELPHIA – Consuming raw milk or products made with it is riskier than drinking pasteurized milk. Yet fewer than half of U.S. adults know that drinking raw milk is less safe than drinking pasteurized milk and many Americans do not understand the risks of consuming raw milk, according to the Annenberg Public Policy Center’s latest health survey. 

The survey finds that 47% percent of U.S. adults know that drinking raw milk is less safe than drinking pasteurized milk, while nearly a quarter (24%) of Americans either think incorrectly that pasteurization is not effective at killing bacteria and viruses in milk products (4%) or are not sure whether this is true (20%).

“It is important that anyone planning to consume raw milk be aware that doing so can make you sick and that pasteurization reduces the risk of milk-borne illnesses,” said Patrick E. Jamieson, director of the Annenberg Health and Risk Communication Institute at the Annenberg Public Policy Center (APPC) of the University of Pennsylvania.

APPC’s survey was conducted by SSRS, a market research company, on June 7-10, 2024, as a cross-sectional survey of 1,031 U.S. adults who are part of the SSRS Opinion Panel Omnibus. The margin of error for total respondents is ±3.5 percentage points at the 95% confidence level. (See the end of this release or the topline for further details.)

Why consuming raw milk is risky

Milk from animals including cows, sheep, and goats that has not been pasteurized to kill harmful germs is called unpasteurized or raw milk. Unpasteurized dairy products are estimated to “cause 840 times more illnesses and 45 times more hospitalizations than pasteurized products.” The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) says that consuming unpasteurized milk and products made from it “can expose people to germs such as Campylobacter, Cryptosporidium, E. coli, Listeria, Brucella, and Salmonella.”

Heightening these concerns, the Food and Drug Administration (FDA) reported in an open letter on June 6, 2024, that bird flu has been detected in cow’s milk. Cattle infected with avian influenza “shed the virus in their milk.” Technically known as highly pathogenic avian influenza virus (HPAI) of the H5N1 subtype, the CDC has noted that H5N1 bird flu is “widespread in wild birds worldwide and is causing outbreaks in poultry and U.S. dairy cows.” The presence of H5N1 bird flu was confirmed in cattle in the United States in mid-March 2024. As of June 21, 2024, there had been four human cases of H5N1 in the United States since 2022, three in April and May of 2024 following exposure to cows and one in April 2022 following exposure to poultry. As of mid-June, 95 cattle herds in 12 states were identified as infected.

The FDA says it does not currently know whether the HPAI H5N1 virus can be transmitted to humans through consumption of raw milk and products made from raw milk from infected cows. However, a study conducted in mice concluded that the virus in “untreated milk can infect susceptible animals that consume it” and the National Institutes of Health (NIH) says this suggests that drinking raw milk “may pose a risk of transmission to people.” As of mid-June 2024, the FDA concluded “that the totality of evidence continues to indicate that the commercial milk supply [which is pasteurized] is safe.”

Although the FDA has prohibited the interstate sale of raw milk since 1987, 30 states in the United States allow the sale of raw dairy milk in some form, according to the NIH. While an FDA food safety report in 2016 said just 4.4% of U.S. adults reported consuming raw milk at least once in the past year, raw milk sales have been increasing, according to the Associated Press, which reports that weekly sales of raw milk from late March to mid-May grew from 21% to as much as 65% over the same period last year.

What people know about the risks of raw milk and benefits of pasteurization

The CDC notes that “pasteurization is crucial for milk safety, killing harmful germs that can cause illness” and the NIH says “dairy milk purchased in the grocery store has been pasteurized – heated to a level high enough and long enough to kill most viruses or bacteria in the milk.”

Yet in the APPC survey, over half of the respondents (54%) either think drinking raw milk is safer (9%), just as safe (15%), or are unsure (30%) whether it is more or less safe than drinking pasteurized milk. Nearly a quarter of those surveyed question the effectiveness of pasteurization at killing bacteria and viruses in untreated milk – 20% are unsure whether it is effective and 4% incorrectly assert that it is not effective.

Who holds correct and mistaken beliefs about raw milk?

An analysis of survey data shows that adults who are 65 and older, college educated, or who identify with the Democratic Party are more likely to understand the benefits of pasteurization and to believe that pasteurization does not destroy the nutrients in milk. The survey finds that Democrats are more likely than Republicans to believe that drinking raw milk is less safe than pasteurized milk (57% vs. 37%). People living in an urban environment also are more likely to believe that raw milk is less safe than pasteurized milk than people in a rural environment (49% vs. 32%).

“The difference in views of raw milk that we see between Democrats and Republicans is difficult to disentangle from the difference between rural and urban dwellers,” said Kathleen Hall Jamieson, director of the Annenberg Public Policy Center. “Those in rural areas are both more likely to identify as Republicans and to consume raw milk.”

However, a regression analysis conducted by APPC research analyst Shawn Patterson Jr. shows that both which political party one identifies with and where one lives independently predict an individual’s beliefs about the safety of raw milk. But the analysis also shows that where one lives does not independently predict beliefs about the effectiveness of pasteurization nor the effect pasteurization has on the nutrients of milk. (See the appendix for regression analysis.)

The nutritional value of pasteurized vs. raw milk

Viral online videos championing the purported benefits of raw milk attracted millions of views between late March, when the presence of bird flu virus was first confirmed in U.S. cattle, and mid-May, according to reports in the Associated Press and Washington Post. Drinking raw milk has been encouraged as well by some political leaders, including presidential candidate Robert F. Kennedy Jr., who told the audience at an October 2022 meeting of his Children’s Health Defense that he drinks raw milk exclusively.

Among the arguments advanced in favor of consuming raw milk is that pasteurization destroys valuable nutrients – but the CDC states that pasteurized milk “offers the same nutritional benefits without the risks of raw milk consumption.”

Our survey finds that less than half of Americans (43%) know that pasteurization “does not destroy nutrients in milk,” while 16% believe that it does destroy nutrients and 41% are not sure. Notably, the survey finds that younger people (18- to 29-year-olds) are more likely to believe than older adults (65 and older) that pasteurization destroys the nutrients in milk (25% vs. 5%) and Republicans are much more likely to believe it than Democrats (23% vs. 8%). Whether one lives in an urban vs. rural setting is not significantly different in this belief.

APPC’s survey

This study was conducted for APPC by SSRS, on its Opinion Panel Omnibus platform. The SSRS Opinion Panel Omnibus is a national, twice-per-month, probability-based survey. Data collection was conducted from June 7–10, 2024 among a sample of 1,031 respondents. The survey was conducted via web (n=1,001) and telephone (n=30) and administered in English (n=1,005) and Spanish (n=26). The margin of error for total respondents is +/-3.5 percentage points at the 95% confidence level. All SSRS Opinion Panel Omnibus data are weighted to represent the target population of U.S. adults ages 18 or older.

In addition to Patrick Jamieson, Kathleen Hall Jamieson, and Shawn Patterson Jr., APPC’s survey team includes Ken Winneg, managing director of survey research.

Download the topline, appendix, and methodology statements.

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The Annenberg Public Policy Center was established in 1993 to educate the public and policy makers about communication’s role in advancing public understanding of political, science, and health issues at the local, state, and federal levels.

Why Won’t the US Help Negotiate a Peaceful End to the War in Ukraine?

For goodness' sake, negotiate!

by Jeffrey D. Sachs Posted onJune 26, 2024

Reprinted from CommonDreams.

For the fifth time since 2008, Russia has proposed to negotiate with the U.S. over security arrangements, this time in proposals made by President Vladimir Putin on June 14, 2024. Four previous times, the U.S. rejected the offer of negotiations in favor of a neocon strategy to weaken or dismember Russia through war and covert operations. The U.S. neocon tactics have failed disastrously, devastating Ukraine in the process, and endangering the whole world. After all the warmongering, it’s time for Biden to open negotiations for peace with Russia.

Since the end of the Cold War, the U.S. grand strategy has been to weaken Russia. As early as 1992, then Defense Secretary Richard Cheney opined that following the 1991 demise of the Soviet Union, Russia too should be dismembered. Zbigniew Brzezinski opined in 1997 that Russia should be divided into three loosely confederated entities in Russian Europe, Siberia, and the far east. In 1999, the U.S.-led NATO alliance bombed Russia’s ally, Serbia, for 78 days in order to break Serbia apart and install a massive NATO military base in breakaway Kosovo. Leaders of the U.S. military-industrial complex vociferously supported the Chechen war against Russia in the early 2000s.

To secure these U.S. advances against Russia, Washington aggressively pushed NATO enlargement, despite promises to Mikhail Gorbachev and Boris Yeltsin that NATO would not move one inch eastward from Germany. Most tendentiously, the U.S. pushed NATO enlargement to Ukraine and Georgia, with the idea of surrounding Russia’s naval fleet in Sevastopol, Crimea with NATO states: Ukraine, Romania (NATO member 2004), Bulgaria (NATO member 2004), Turkey (NATO member 1952), and Georgia, an idea straight from the playbook of the British Empire in the Crimean War (1853-6).

Brzezinski spelled out a chronology of NATO enlargement in 1997, including NATO membership of Ukraine during 2005-2010. The U.S. in fact proposed NATO membership for Ukraine and Georgia at the 2008 NATO Bucharest Summit. By 2020, NATO had in fact enlarged by 14 countries in Central Europe, Eastern Europe, and the former Soviet Union (Czech Republic, Hungary, and Poland in 1999; Bulgaria, Estonia, Latvia, Lithuania, Romania, Slovakia, and Slovenia in 2004; Albania and Croatia, 2009; Montenegro, 2017; and Northern Macedonia, 2020), while promising future membership to Ukraine and Georgia.

In short, the 30-year U.S. project, hatched originally by Cheney and the neocons, and carried forward consistently since then, has been to weaken or even dismember Russia, surround Russia with NATO forces, and depict Russia as the belligerent power.

It is against this grim backdrop that Russian leaders have repeatedly proposed to negotiate security arrangements with Europe and the U.S. that would provide security for all countries concerned, not just the NATO bloc. Guided by the neocon game plan, the U.S. has refused to negotiate on every occasion, while trying to pin the blame on Russia for the lack of negotiations.

In June 2008, as the U.S. prepared to expand NATO to Ukraine and Georgia, Russian President Dmitry Medvedev proposed a European Security Treaty, calling for collective security and an end to NATO’s unilateralism. Suffice it to say, the U.S. showed no interest whatsoever in Russia’s proposals, and instead proceeded with its long-held plans for NATO enlargement.

The second Russian proposal for negotiations came from Putin following the violent overthrow of Ukraine’s President Viktor Yanukovych in February 2014, with the active complicity if not outright leadership of the U.S. government. I happened to see the U.S. complicity up close, as the post-coup government invited me for urgent economic discussions. When I arrived in Kiev, I was taken to the Maidan, where I was told directly about U.S. funding of the Maidan protest.

The evidence of U.S. complicity in the coup is overwhelming. Assistant Secretary of State Victoria Nuland was caught on a phone line in January 2014 plotting the change of government in Ukraine. Meanwhile, U.S. Senators went personally to Kiev to stir up the protests (akin to Chinese or Russian political leaders coming to DC on January 6, 2021 to rile up the crowds). On February 21, 2014, the Europeans, U.S., and Russia brokered a deal with Yanukovych in which Yanukovich agreed to early elections. Yet the coup leaders reneged on the deal the same day, took over government buildings, threatened more violence, and deposed Yanukovych the next day. The U.S. supported the coup and immediately extended recognition to the new government.

In my view, this was a standard CIA-led covert regime change operation, of which there have been several dozen around the world, including sixty-four episodes between 1947 and 1989 meticulously documented by Professor Lindsey O’Rourke. Covert regime-change operations are of course not really hidden from view, but the U.S. government vociferously denies its role, keeps all documents highly confidential, and systematically gaslights the world: “Do not believe what you see plainly with your own eyes! The U.S. had nothing to do with this.” Details of the operations eventually emerge, however, through eyewitnesses, whistleblowers, the forced release of documents under the Freedom of Information Act, declassification of papers after years or decades, and memoirs, but all far too late for real accountability.

In any event, the violent coup induced the ethnic-Russia Donbas region of Eastern Ukraine to break from the coup leaders, many of whom were extreme Russophobic nationalists, and some in violent groups with a history of Nazi SS links in the past. Almost immediately, the coup leaders took steps to repress the use of the Russian language even in the Russian-speaking Donbas. In the following months and years, the government in Kiev launched a military campaign to retake the breakaway regions, deploying neo-Nazi paramilitary units and U.S. arms.

In the course of 2014, Putin called repeatedly for a negotiated peace, and this led to the Minsk II Agreement in February 2015 based on autonomy of the Donbas and an end to violence by both sides. Russia did not claim the Donbas as Russian territory, but instead called for autonomy and the protection of ethnic Russians within Ukraine. The UN Security Council endorsed the Minsk II agreement, but the U.S. neocons privately subverted it. Years later, Chancellor Angela Merkel blurted out the truth. The Western side treated the agreement not as a solemn treaty but as a delaying tactic to “give Ukraine time” to build its military strength. In the meantime, around 14,000 people died in the fighting in Donbas between 2014 and 2021.

Following the definitive collapse of the Minsk II agreement, Putin again proposed negotiations with the U.S. in December 2021. By that point, the issues went even beyond NATO enlargement to include fundamental issues of nuclear armaments. Step by step, the U.S. neocons had abandoned nuclear arms control with Russia, with the U.S. unilaterally abandoning the Anti-Ballistic Missile (ABM) Treaty in 2002, placing Aegis missiles in Poland and Romania in 2010 onwards, and walking out of the Intermediate Nuclear Force (INF) Treaty in 2019.

In view of these dire concerns, Putin put on the table on December 15, 2021 a draft “Treaty between the United States of America and the Russian Federation on Security Guarantees.” The most immediate issue on the table (Article 4 of the draft treaty) was the end of the U.S. attempt to expand NATO to Ukraine. I called U.S. National Security Advisor Jake Sullivan at the end of 2021 to try to convince the Biden White House to enter the negotiations. My main advice was to avoid a war in Ukraine by accepting Ukraine’s neutrality, rather than NATO membership, which was a bright red line for Russia.

The White House flatly rejected the advice, claiming remarkably (and obtusely) that NATO’s enlargement to Ukraine was none of Russia’s business! Yet what would the U.S. say if some country in the Western hemisphere decided to host Chinese or Russian bases? Would the White House, State Department, or Congress say, “That’s just fine, that’s a matter of concern only to Russia or China and the host country?” No. The world nearly came to nuclear Armageddon in 1962 when the Soviet Union placed nuclear missiles in Cuba and the U.S. imposed a naval quarantine and threatened war unless the Russians removed the missiles. The U.S. military alliance does not belong in Ukraine any more than the Russian or Chinese military belongs close to the U.S. border.

The fourth offer of Putin to negotiate came in March 2022, when Russia and Ukraine nearly closed a peace deal just weeks after the start of Russia’s special military operation that began on February 24, 2022. Russia, once again, was after one big thing: Ukraine’s neutrality, i.e., no NATO membership and no hosting of U.S. missiles on Russia’s border.

Ukraine’s President Vladimir Zelensky quickly accepted Ukraine’s neutrality, and Ukraine and Russia exchanged papers, with the skillful mediation of the Foreign Ministry of Turkey. Then suddenly, at the end of March, Ukraine abandoned the negotiations.

U.K. Prime Minister Boris Johnson, following in the tradition of British anti-Russian war-mongering dating back to the Crimean War (1853-6), actually flew to Kiev to warn Zelensky against neutrality and the importance of Ukraine defeating Russia on the battlefield. Since that date, Ukraine has lost around 500,000 dead and is on the ropes on the battlefield.

Now we have Russia’s fifth offer of negotiations, explained clearly and cogently by Putin himself in his speech to diplomats at the Russian Foreign Ministry on June 14. Putin laid out Russia’s proposed terms to end the war in Ukraine.

“Ukraine should adopt a neutral, non-aligned status, be nuclear- free, and undergo demilitarization and de-nazification,” Putin said. “These parameters were broadly agreed upon during the Istanbul negotiations in 2022, including specific details on demilitarization such as the agreed numbers of tanks and other military equipment. We reached consensus on all points.

“Certainly, the rights, freedoms, and interests of Russian-speaking citizens in Ukraine must be fully protected,” he continued. “The new territorial realities, including the status of Crimea, Sevastopol, Donetsk and Lugansk people’s republics, Kherson, and Zaporozhye regions as parts of the Russian Federation, should be acknowledged. These foundational principles need to be formalized through fundamental international agreements in the future. Naturally, this entails the removal of all Western sanctions against Russia as well.”

Let me say a few words about negotiating.

Russia’s proposals should now be met at the negotiating table by proposals from the U.S. and Ukraine. The White House is dead wrong to evade negotiations just because of disagreements with Russia’s proposals. It should put up its own proposals and get down to the business of negotiating an end to the war.

There are three core issues for Russia: Ukraine’s neutrality (non-NATO enlargement), Crimea remaining in Russian hands, and boundary changes in Eastern and Southern Ukraine. The first two are almost surely non-negotiable. The end of NATO enlargement is the fundamental casus belli. Crimea is also core for Russia, as Crimea has been home to Russia’s Black Sea fleet since 1783 and is fundamental to Russia’s national security.

The third core issue, the borders of Eastern and Southern Ukraine, will be a key point of negotiations. The U.S. cannot pretend that borders are sacrosanct after NATO bombed Serbia in 1999 to relinquish Kosovo, and after the U.S. pressured Sudan to relinquish South Sudan. Yes, Ukraine’s borders will be redrawn as the result of the 10 years of war, the situation on the battlefield, the choices of the local populations, and tradeoffs made at the negotiating table.

Biden needs to accept that negotiations are not a sign of weakness. As Kennedy put it, “Never negotiate out of fear, but never fear to negotiate.” Ronald Reagan famously described his own negotiating strategy using a Russian proverb, “Trust but verify.”

The neocon approach to Russia, delusional and hubristic from the start, lies in ruins. NATO will never enlarge to Ukraine and Georgia. Russia will not be toppled by a CIA covert operation. Ukraine is being horribly bloodied on the battlefield, often losing 1,000 or more dead and wounded in a single day. The failed neocon game plan brings us closer to nuclear Armageddon.

Yet Biden still refuses to negotiate. Following Putin’s speech, the U.S., NATO, and Ukraine firmly rejected negotiations once again. Biden and his team have still not relinquished the neocon fantasy of defeating Russia and expanding NATO to Ukraine.

The Ukrainian people have been lied to time and again by Zelensky and Biden and other leaders of NATO countries, who told them falsely and repeatedly that Ukraine would prevail on the battlefield and that there were no options to negotiate. Ukraine is now under martial law. The public is given no say about its own slaughter.

For the sake of Ukraine’s very survival, and to avoid nuclear war, the President of the United States has one overriding responsibility today: Negotiate.

Jeffrey D. Sachs is a University Professor and Director of the Center for Sustainable Development at Columbia University, where he directed The Earth Institute from 2002 until 2016. He is also President of the UN Sustainable Development Solutions Network and a commissioner of the UN Broadband Commission for Development. He has been advisor to three United Nations Secretaries-General, and currently serves as an SDG Advocate under Secretary-General Antonio Guterres. Sachs is the author, most recently, of A New Foreign Policy: Beyond American Exceptionalism (2020). Other books include: Building the New American Economy: Smart, Fair, and Sustainable (2017), and The Age of Sustainable Development, (2015) with Ban Ki-moon.

Did the West Provoke the Ukraine War? Sorry, that Question Has Been Cancelled

by Media Lens / June 26th, 2024

Is it possible for an entire ‘mainstream’ media system – every newspaper, website, TV channel – to completely suppress one side of a crucial argument without anyone expressing outrage, or even noticing? Consider the following.

In February 2022, Nigel Farage, former and future leader of the Reform UK party, tweeted that Russia’s invasion of Ukraine was:

‘A consequence of EU and NATO expansion, which came to a head in 2014. It made no sense to poke the Russian bear with a stick.’

In a recent interview, the BBC reminded Farage of this comment. He responded:

‘Why did I say that? It was obvious to me that the ever-eastward expansion of NATO and the European Union was giving this man [Putin] a reason to his Russian people to say they’re coming for us again, and to go to war.

‘We’ve provoked this war – of course it’s his fault – he’s used what we’ve done as an excuse.’

The BBC quickly made this a major news story by publishing a front page, top headline piece by BBC journalist Becky Morton who cited, and repeated, high-level sources attacking Farage. Morton wrote:

‘Former Conservative Defence Secretary Ben Wallace, who is not standing in the election, told BBC Radio 4’s Today programme Mr Farage was like a “pub bore we’ve all met at the end of the bar”.’

And:

‘Conservative Home Secretary James Cleverly said Mr Farage was echoing Mr Putin’s “vile justification” for the war and Labour branded him “unfit” for any political office.’

Morton then repeated both criticisms:

‘Mr Wallace – who oversaw the UK’s response to the Russian invasion of Ukraine in 2022 – said Mr Farage “is a bit like that pub bore we’ve all met at the end of the bar” and often presents “very simplistic answers” to complex problems.’

And:

‘Conservative Home Secretary James Cleverly said Mr Farage was “echoing Putin’s vile justification for the brutal invasion of Ukraine”.’

Morton piled on the pain:

‘Labour defence spokesman John Healey said Mr Farage’s comments made him “unfit for any political office in our country, let alone leading a serious party in Parliament”.

‘Former Nato Secretary General Lord Robertson accused Mr Farage of “parroting the Kremlin Line” and “producing new excuses for the brutal, unprovoked attack”.’

Wallace, Cleverly, Healey and Robertson are all, of course, influential, high-profile figures; compiling their criticisms in this way sent a powerful message to BBC readers. Remarkably, one might think – given the BBC’s supposed devotion to presenting ‘both sides’ of an argument – Morton offered no source of any kind in support of Farage’s argument.

The BBC intensified its coverage by opening a ‘Live’ blog (reserved for top news stories, disasters and scandals) on the issue, titled:

‘Farage “won’t apologise” for Ukraine comments after Starmer and Sunak criticism’

The BBC reported:

‘Keir Starmer has called Nigel Farage’s comments on Ukraine “disgraceful” as Rishi Sunak says they play into Putin’s hands’

Again, nowhere in the ‘Live’ blog coverage did the BBC cite arguments in support of Farage’s argument. Is it because they don’t exist?

In June 2022, Ramzy Baroud interviewed Noam Chomsky:

‘Chomsky told us that it “should be clear that the (Russian) invasion of Ukraine has no (moral) justification.” He compared it to the US invasion of Iraq, seeing it as an example of “supreme international crime.” With this moral question settled, Chomsky believes that the main “background” of this war, a factor that is missing in mainstream media coverage, is “NATO expansion.”

‘”This is not just my opinion,” said Chomsky, “it is the opinion of every high-level US official in the diplomatic services who has any familiarity with Russia and Eastern Europe. This goes back to George Kennan and, in the 1990s, Reagan’s ambassador Jack Matlock, including the current director of the CIA; in fact, just everybody who knows anything has been warning Washington that it is reckless and provocative to ignore Russia’s very clear and explicit red lines. That goes way before (Vladimir) Putin, it has nothing to do with him; (Mikhail) Gorbachev, all said the same thing. Ukraine and Georgia cannot join NATO, this is the geostrategic heartland of Russia.”’

We know people are interested in Chomsky’s views on the Ukraine war because when we posted a comment from him on X it received 430,000 views and 7,000 likes (huge numbers by our standards).

In 2022, John Pilger commented:

‘The news from the war in Ukraine is mostly not news, but a one-sided litany of jingoism, distortion, omission.  I have reported a number of wars and have never known such blanket propaganda.

‘In February, Russia invaded Ukraine as a response to almost eight years of killing and criminal destruction in the Russian-speaking region of Donbass on their border.

‘In 2014, the United States had sponsored a coup in Kiev that got rid of Ukraine’s democratically elected, Russian-friendly president and installed a successor whom the Americans made clear was their man.’

Pilger added:

‘Russia’s invasion of Ukraine is wanton and inexcusable. It is a crime to invade a sovereign country. There are no “buts” – except one.

‘When did the present war in Ukraine begin and who started it? According to the United Nations, between 2014 and this year, some 14,000 people have been killed in the Kiev regime’s civil war on the Donbass. Many of the attacks were carried out by neo-Nazis.’

In May 2023, economist Jeffrey Sachs of Columbia University wrote:

‘Regarding the Ukraine War, the Biden administration has repeatedly and falsely claimed that the Ukraine War started with an unprovoked attack by Russia on Ukraine on February 24, 2022. In fact, the war was provoked by the U.S. in ways that leading U.S. diplomats anticipated for decades in the lead-up to the war, meaning that the war could have been avoided and should now be stopped through negotiations.

‘Recognizing that the war was provoked helps us to understand how to stop it. It doesn’t justify Russia’s invasion.’ (Our emphasis)

Sachs has previously been presented as a credible source by the BBC on other issues. In 2007, Sachs gave five talks for the BBC’s Reith Lectures.

The New Yorker magazine described political scientist Professor John Mearsheimer of the University of Chicago as ‘one of the most famous critics of American foreign policy since the end of the Cold War’. Mearsheimer commented:

‘I think the evidence is clear that we did not think he [Putin] was an aggressor before February 22, 2014. This is a story that we invented so that we could blame him. My argument is that the West, especially the United States, is principally responsible for this disaster. But no American policymaker, and hardly anywhere in the American foreign-policy establishment, is going to want to acknowledge that line of argument…’

There are numerous other credible sources, including Benjamin Abelow, author of How The West Brought War to Ukraine (Siland Press, 2022) and Richard Sakwa, Frontline Ukraine: Crisis in the Borderlands (Yale University Press, 2022). Journalist Ian Sinclair, author of The March That Shook Blair (Peace News, 2013), published a collection of material titled:

‘Testimony from US government and military officials, and other experts, on the role of NATO expansion in creating the conditions for the Russian invasion of Ukraine’

Sinclair cited, for example, current CIA Director William Burns:

‘Sitting at the embassy in Moscow in the mid-nineties, it seemed to me that NATO expansion was premature at best and needlessly provocative at worst.’

And George F. Kennan, a leading US Cold War diplomat:

‘…something of the highest importance is at stake here. And perhaps it is not too late to advance a view that, I believe, is not only mine alone but is shared by a number of others with extensive and in most instances more recent experience in Russian matters. The view, bluntly stated, is that expanding NATO would be the most fateful error of American policy in the entire post-cold-war era’.

We can understand why the BBC might want to cite Sunak, Starmer, Wallace, Cleverly, Healey and Robertson, but we can’t understand why it would ignore the counterarguments and sources cited above.

It gets worse. A piece in the Daily Mail essentially repeated the BBC performance with endless vitriolic comments again cited from Sunak, Starmer, Cleverly, Healey, Robertson and several others. And again, no counterarguments.

A Reuter’s report quoted Sunak and Healey but no counterarguments.

ITV cited former prime minister Boris Johnson:

‘To try and spread the blame is morally repugnant and parroting Putin’s lies.’

No counterarguments were allowed, other than from Farage himself. At a recent rally, he held up a front-page headline from the i newspaper in 2016, which read, tragicomically:

‘Boris blames EU for war in Ukraine’

That about sums up the state of both Boris Johnson and UK politics generally.

The Telegraph cited Cleverly and other high-profile sources attacking Farage:

‘Tobias Ellwood, the former Tory defence minister, told The Telegraph: “Churchill will be turning in his grave. Putin, already enjoying how Farage is disrupting British politics, will be delighted to hear this talk of appeasement entering our election debate.”

‘Lord West of Spithead, the former chief of the naval staff, said: “Anyone who gives any seeming excuse to president Putin and his disgraceful attack … is standing into danger as regards their views on world affairs.” James Cleverly, the Home Secretary, wrote on X, formerly Twitter: “Just Farage echoing Putin’s vile justification for the brutal invasion of Ukraine.”

‘Liam Fox, the former Tory defence secretary, told The Telegraph: “The West did not ‘provoke this war’ in Ukraine and it is shocking that Nigel Farage should say so.”’ (Daily Telegraph, ‘Farage: West provoked Russia to attack Ukraine’, 22 June 2024)

Again, all alternative views were ignored as non-existent.

In the Independent, journalist Tom Watling packed his article with comments from Sunak, Starmer and Wallace. Again, no counterarguments were allowed.

The Guardian cited Sunak, Healey and Cleverly. Again, no counterarguments were included. (Peter Walker, ‘Nigel Farage claims Russia was provoked into Ukraine war’, The Guardian, 21 June 2024)

With such limited resources, it is difficult for us to wade through all mentions of this story, but we will stick our necks out and suggest that it is quite possible that no sources supporting Farage’s argument have been cited in any UK national newspaper.

By any rational accounting, this ‘mainstream’ coverage is actually a form of totalitarian propaganda. It has denied the British public the ability to even understand the criticisms. Most people reading these reports will simply not understand why Farage made the claim – it is a taboo subject in ‘mainstream’ coverage – and so they have no way of making sense of either his argument or the backlash. This is deep bias presented as ‘news’. It is fake news.

And this suppression of honest journalism in relation to one of the most dangerous and devastating wars of our time, in which our own country is deeply involved, is happening in the run up to what is supposed to be a democratic election.

None of the above is intended as a defence of Farage’s wider political stance. On the contrary, we agree with political journalist Peter Oborne:

‘Farage, a close ally of Donald Trump, who has supported Marine Le Pen in France and spoken at an AfD rally in Germany, fits naturally into the rancid politics of the far-right movements making ground across Europe and in the United States.’

Farage and his far-right views have been endlessly platformed by the BBC.

Needless to say, the Ukraine war is only one of many key issues that are off the agenda for our choice-as-no-choice political system. In a rare example of dissent, Owen Jones commented in the Guardian:

‘Is this a serious country or not? It is egregious enough that this general election campaign is so stripped of discussion about the defining issues facing us at home for the next half decade, whether that be public spending, the NHS or education. But it is especially shocking how quickly the butchery in Gaza – and the position of this imploding government and its successor – has been forgotten.’

Jones noted:

‘On Thursday night’s BBC Question Time leaders’ special, there was not a single question or answer on Gaza.

‘Seriously? Clearly this is an issue that matters to many Britons.’

Earlier this month, Professor Bill McGuire, Emeritus Professor of Geophysical and Climate Hazards at University College London commented:

‘The most astonishing thing about the UK election campaign is not what the leaders and parties are saying, but what they are NOT saying

‘It beggars belief that the #climate is simply not an issue and – as far as I have heard – has not been addressed by either leader

‘Just criminal’

It works like magic: two major political parties ostensibly representing the ‘left’ and ‘right’ of the political spectrum, but both actually serving the same establishment interests, naturally ignore issues that offend power. Establishment media can then also ignore these issues on the pretext that the party-political system covers the entire spectrum of thinkable thought, and that any ideas outside that ‘spectrum’ have no particular right to be heard at election time. Indeed, to venture beyond the carefully filtered bubble of party politics is seen as actually undemocratic. As one ITV journalist reported:

‘Outrage at Nigel Farage’s comments about the war in Ukraine has drawn criticism from all corners of British politics.’

Not quite. They drew criticism from the select few corners of British politics that are allowed to exist in our ‘managed democracy’.

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Media Lens is a UK-based media watchdog group headed by David Edwards and David Cromwell. The most recent Media Lens book, Propaganda Blitz by David Edwards and David Cromwell, was published in 2018 by Pluto Press. Read other articles by Media Lens, or visit Media Lens's website.

NATO’s Endgame Appears to Be Nuclear War

by Chris Wright / June 25th, 2024

The world is at its most dangerous moment since the Cuban Missile Crisis of 1962. Back then, however, the fear of total destruction consumed the public; today, few people seem even to be aware of this possibility.

It is easily imaginable that nuclear war could break out between Russia (and perhaps China) and the West, yet politicians continue to escalate tensions, place hundreds of thousands of troops at “high readiness,” and attack military targets inside Russia, even while ordinary citizens blithely go on with their lives.

The situation is without parallel in history.

Consider the following facts. A hostile military alliance, now including even Sweden and Finland, is at the very borders of Russia. How are Russian leaders—whose country was almost destroyed by Western invasion twice in the twentieth century—supposed to react to this? How would Washington react if Mexico or Canada belonged to an enormous, expansionist, and highly belligerent anti-U.S. military alliance?

As if expanding NATO to include Eastern Europe wasn’t provocative enough, Washington began to send billions of dollars’ worth of military aid to Ukraine in 2014, to “improve interoperability with NATO,” in the words of the Defense Department. Why this Western involvement in Ukraine, which, as Obama said while president, is “a core Russian interest but not an American one”? One reason was given by Senator Lindsey Graham in a recent moment of startling televised candor: Ukraine is “sitting on $10 to $12 trillion of critical minerals… I don’t want to give that money and those assets to Putin to share with China.”

As the Washington Post has reported, “Ukraine harbors some of the world’s largest reserves of titanium and iron ore, fields of untapped lithium and massive deposits of coal. Collectively, they are worth tens of trillions of dollars.” Ukraine also has colossal reserves of natural gas and oil, in addition to neon, nickel, beryllium, and other critical rare earth metals. For NATO’s leadership, Russia and, in particular, China can’t be permitted access to these resources. The war in Ukraine must, therefore, continue indefinitely, and negotiations with Russia mustn’t be pursued.

Meanwhile, as Ukraine was being de facto integrated into NATO in the years before 2022, the United States put into operation an anti-ballistic-missile site in Romania in 2016. As Benjamin Abelow notes in How the West Brought War to Ukraine, the missile launchers that the ABM system uses can accommodate nuclear-tipped offensive weapons like the Tomahawk cruise missile. “Tomahawks,” he points out, “have a range of 1,500 miles, can strike Moscow and other targets deep inside Russia, and can carry hydrogen bomb warheads with selectable yields up to 150 kilotons, roughly ten times that of the atomic bomb that destroyed Hiroshima.” Poland now boasts a similar ABM site.

American assurances that these anti-missile bases are defensive in nature, to protect against an (incredibly unlikely) attack from Iran, can hardly reassure Russia, given the missile launchers’ capability to launch offensive weapons.

In another bellicose move, the Trump administration in 2019 unilaterally withdrew from the 1987 Treaty on Intermediate-Range Nuclear Forces. Russia responded by proposing that the U.S. declare a moratorium on the deployment of short- and intermediate-range nuclear missiles in Europe, saying it wouldn’t deploy such missiles as long as NATO members didn’t. Washington dismissed these proposals, which upset some European leaders. “Has the absence of dialogue with Russia,” Emmanuel Macron said, “made the European continent any safer? I don’t think so.”

The situation is especially dangerous given what experts call “warhead ambiguity.” As senior Russian military officers have said, “there will be no way to determine if an incoming ballistic missile is fitted with a nuclear or a conventional warhead, and so the military will see it as a nuclear attack” that warrants a nuclear retaliation. A possible misunderstanding could thus plunge the world into nuclear war.

So now we’re more than two years into a proxy war with Russia that has killed hundreds of thousands of people and has seen Ukraine even more closely integrated into the structures of NATO than it was before. And the West continues to inch ever closer to the nuclear precipice. Ukraine has begun using U.S. missiles to strike Russian territory, including defensive (not only offensive) missile systems.

This summer, Denmark, the Netherlands, Norway, and Belgium will begin sending F-16 fighter jets to Ukraine; and Denmark and the Netherlands have said there will be no restrictions on the use of these planes to strike targets in Russia. F-16s are able to deliver nuclear weapons, and Russia has said the planes will be considered a nuclear threat.

Bringing the world even closer to terminal crisis, NATO Secretary-General Jens Stoltenberg states that 500,000 troops are at “high readiness,” and in the next five years, NATO allies will “acquire thousands of air defense and artillery systems, 850 modern aircraft—mostly 5^th-generation F-35s—and also a lot of other high-end capabilities.” Macron has morphed into one of Europe’s most hawkish leaders, with plans to send military instructors to Ukraine very soon. At the same time, NATO is holding talks about taking more nuclear weapons out of storage and placing them on standby.

Where all this is heading is unclear, but what’s obvious is that Western leaders are acting with reckless disregard for the future of humanity. Their bet is that Putin will never deploy nuclear weapons, despite his many threats to do so and recent Russian military drills to deploy tactical nuclear weapons. Given that Russian use of nuclear warheads might well precipitate a nuclear response by the West, the fate of humanity hangs on the restraint and rationality of one man, Putin—a figure who is constantly portrayed by Western media and politicians as an irrational, bloodthirsty monster. So the human species is supposed to place its hope for survival in someone we’re told is a madman, who leads a state that feels besieged by the most powerful military coalition in history, apparently committed to its demise.

Maybe the madmen aren’t in the Russian government but rather in NATO governments?

It is downright puzzling that millions of people aren’t protesting in the streets every day to deescalate the crisis and pull civilization back from the brink. Evidently the mass media have successfully fulfilled their function of manufacturing consent. But unless the Western public wakes up, the current crisis might not end as benignly as did the one in 1962.

Chris Wright, Ph.D. in U.S. history (University of Illinois at Chicago), is the author of Worker Cooperatives and Revolution and Popular Radicalism and the Unemployed in Chicago during the Great Depression. Read other articles by Chris, or visit Chris's website.

The Hoover Institution Declares War on Russia

by William M. Drew Posted onJune 26, 2024

In sharp contrast to the original Cold War of 1946-1989 which generally differentiated between Russia as a nation and its then-Communist government, the renewed hostilities between Russia and the West over the Ukraine conflict have seen an ominous wave of Russophobic propaganda targeting the history and culture of Russia. The West’s ideological crusade has repeatedly shown a total disregard for the basic facts of history in its attempt to brand Russia as an evil, aggressive force led by a madman menacing democracy.

A glaring example of this brand of polemics is a recent two-minute video called “Why Russia Fights” produced for the Hoover Institution in an obvious attempt to drum up support for the US proxy war in Ukraine (The video can be accessed here).

Far from limiting its criticism to the policies of Vladimir Putin’s administration, the video from the Hoover Institution paints Russia throughout six centuries of its history as a unified state as a sinister force intent on dominating the world due to an ideology based on moral superiority. Accepting this premise rules out any hope of the West ever peacefully coexisting with Russia unless it is weakened and its vast territory broken up into various small vassal states – as some in the West have argued.

This is a far more extreme position than was ever advanced by influential people and institutions in the earlier Cold War when the principal objection in the West to the Soviet Union was centered on its Communist system rather than its overall history and culture.

By painting Russia as the aggressor and never once mentioning the devastating invasions from the West that Russia suffered over centuries, the Hoover video stands history on its head. Western aggression against Russia was the salient theme in The Battle of Russia, the celebrated wartime documentary produced by Frank Capra for his Why We Fight series. This series was so well known for so long that it seems almost impossible that today’s Western propagandists could ignore it. Indeed, it is likely that those at the Hoover Institution chose the title “Why Russia Fights” as a deliberate attempt to counter Capra’s Why We Fight series. I’m certain the neoconservatives who made the Russophobic video are far from stupid or as ignorant of the basic facts of Russian history as they assume the American public to be. But they clearly believe that the end justifies the means and hence are willing to lie about the past in order to further their cause in the present.

The Hoover Institution apparently calculated that their propaganda will succeed in the present age of disinformation and widespread historical and cultural illiteracy. Unfortunately, they may be right. Surveys have revealed that many Americans do not even know in what century their own Civil War took place or which side Russia was on in World War II. Only a relatively select number of Americans today have seen Eisenstein’s Alexander Nevsky or Mikhail Kalatazov’s The Cranes Are Flying. I doubt if many among the current generation in the US have ever read Tolstoy’s War and Peace or seen the memorable film adaptations by King Vidor and Sergei Bondarchuk.

The new Russophobia that came to the fore in the West during the Maidan coup of 2014 – and became especially virulent in the wake of Russia’s Special Military Operation in Ukraine in 2022 – has been far more sweeping than during the first Cold War or the earlier period of tsarist rule. The attempt in the West to “cancel” Russian culture in the last few years, eerily reminiscent of the campaign against German culture in the US in 1917-18 during World War I, has no parallel in previous periods of tension between Russia and the West, whether in tsarist or Soviet times. Distinctions were once made in the West between Russian artists and their government, with the artist viewed as expressing a spirit of freedom whatever the constraints imposed on him by the particular regime in power.

Now, however, in the wake of the Ukraine crisis, in a manner all too typical of decades of Western political correctness, there have sprung up various analysts who claim to see the hand of Russian autocracy and ethnocentrism in the country’s great writers, a critique in synch with the deplorable efforts of Ukrainian nationalists to suppress Russia’s classic artists as vestiges of imperial oppression.

Western leaders’ present attitude toward the Russian Federation is clearly guided by old stereotypes of “darkest Russia”–consider the statement made by then-Vice President Joe Biden at the Munich Security Conference in February 2018, that “the time will come – it may not come in the near future – but eventually the people of Russia will look West and out of that deep black hole they have been staring into for the last 150 years or longer.” If he was referring to the decade of the 1860s, then he is clearly unfamiliar with the great reforms of Alexander II including the introduction of trial by jury and the emancipation of the serfs which inspired American abolitionists in their own efforts to get rid of slavery. Culturally, what Biden dismissed as a “deep black hole” was an age of incredible artistic achievements—the great novels of Tolstoy, Dostoyevsky and Turgenev and the great music of Tchaikovsky, Rimsky-Korsakov, Borodin, and Mussorgsky.

But the wave of Russophobia has not only sought to erase the achievements of Russia’s distant past – they seek to distort more recent history as well.  In his book, The Road to Unfreedom: Russia, Europe, America, Timothy Snyder, an Establishment historian committed to the new Cold War, consistent with his view that Russia has always been a land of tyrannical darkness, wrote of the “faked 1996 election” in which Boris Yeltsin retained his presidential office but conveniently omitted the major role President Clinton’s advisers played in ensuring that victory. The Hoover Institution once made Alexander Solzhenitsyn an honorary fellow but now condemns as a mortal enemy to Western values the Russian traditions that the writer so powerfully expressed in his works. The West’s chronicle of the new Cold War ignores all of its actions that made February 24, 2022 all but inevitable: the violation of the promise never to expand NATO eastward; the Clinton administration’s strong support of Yeltsin’s autocratic regime in the 1990s and the economic disaster that followed from its policies; the US withdrawal from its arms control treaties with Russia; the US instigation of so-called “color revolutions” hostile to Russia in former Soviet republics, of which the 2014 Maidan coup – which installed a violently Russophobic regime in Ukraine – has been the most disastrous; and the West’s refusal to implement the Minsk accords intended to resolve this crisis.

With the US complicity in Israel’s monstrous Gaza genocide now plainly in evidence, all the West’s high-flown rhetoric about its response to the Ukraine crisis being part of some cosmic struggle between Western democracy and Eastern authoritarianism has been unmasked as nothing more than a hypocritical cover for continued world domination by American military and corporate elites.

The attempt by the Western political and media establishment to whip up fears of the East by simultaneously appealing to Russophobia, Islamophobia and Sinophobia is rooted in centuries of anxieties about “the Other” going back to antiquity. When Western countries have looked eastward, they have experienced uneasiness by the sheer size of these lands, the vastness of their populations, the “strange” customs and cultures of these civilizations, their wealth and power seen as a threat to the West’s planetary domination. At a time when cooperation between East and West is absolutely essential to human survival, there must be a concerted effort by all those who care about continued life on this fragile planet to fight the West’s ancient prejudices. Instead of promulgating as inevitable a “clash of civilizations” between East and West, we must strive for a new consciousness of our shared humanity.

Originally appeared at the American Committee for US-Russia Accord (ACURA) website.

William M. Drew is a writer, film historian, researcher, and college lecturer. He is the author of Speaking of Silents: First Ladies of the Screen (1990) and At the Center of the Frame: Leading Ladies of the Twenties and Thirties (1999) and most recently, of The Woman Who Dared: The Life and Times of Pearl White, Queen of the Serials (2023).