The United States and the Russian
devil: 1917-2017
By
William Blum
March 08,
2017 "Information
Clearing House"
- Conservatives have had a very hard time getting
over President Trump’s much-repeated response to
Fox News anchor Bill O’Reilly’s calling Russian
president Vladimir Putin “a killer”. Replied Trump:
“There are a lot of killers. We have a lot of
killers. You think our country is so innocent?”
One could
almost feel a bit sorry for O’Reilly as he struggled
to regain his composure in the face of such
blasphemy. Had any American establishment media star
ever heard such a thought coming from the mouth of
an American president? From someone on the radical
left, yes, but from the president?
Senator
John McCain on the floor of Congress, referring to
Putin, tore into attempts to draw “moral equivalency
between that butcher and thug and KGB colonel and
the United States of America.”
Ah yes, the
infamous KGB. Can anything good be said about a
person associated with such an organization? We
wouldn’t like it if a US president had a background
with anything like that. Oh, wait, a president of
the United States was not merely a CIA “colonel”,
but was the Director of the CIA! I of course speak
of George Herbert Walker Bush. And as far as
butchery and thuggery … How many Americans remember
the December 1989 bombing and invasion of the people
of Panama carried out by the same Mr. Bush? Many
thousands killed or wounded; thousands more left
homeless.
Try and
match that, Vladimir!
And in case
you’re wondering for what good reason all this was
perpetrated? Officially, to arrest dictator Manuel
Noriega on drug charges. How is that for a
rationalization for widespread devastation and
slaughter? It should surprise no one that only
shortly before the invasion Noriega had been on the
CIA payroll.
It’s the
“moral equivalency” that’s so tough to swallow for
proud Americans like O’Reilly and McCain. Republican
Senate Majority leader Mitch McConnell also chipped
in with: “And no, I don’t think there’s any
equivalency between the way the Russians conduct
themselves and the way the United States does.” (3)
Other Senators
echoed the same theme, all inspired by good ol’
“American exceptionalism”, drilled into the mind of
every decent American from childhood on … Who would
dare to compare the morals of (ugh!) Russia with
those of God’s chosen land, even in Moscow’s current
non-communist form?
The
communist form began of course with the October 1917
Russian Revolution. By the summer of 1918 some
13,000 American troops could be found in the
newly-born state, the future Union of Soviet
Socialist Republics. Two years and thousands of
casualties later, the American troops left, having
failed in their mission to “strangle at its birth”
the Bolshevik state, as Winston Churchill so
charmingly put it.
US foreign
policy has not been much more noble-minded since
then. I think, dear students, it’s time for me to
once again present my concise historical summary:
Since the
end of World War 2, the United States has:
-
Attempted to overthrow
more than 50 foreign governments, most of which
were democratically-elected.
-
Dropped bombs
on the people of more than 30 countries.
-
Attempted to assassinate
more than 50 foreign leaders.
-
Attempted to suppress
a populist or nationalist movement in 20
countries.
-
Grossly interfered in democratic elections in at
least 30 countries.
- Though
not as easy to quantify, has also led the world
in torture; not only the torture performed
directly by Americans upon foreigners, but
providing torture equipment, torture manuals,
lists of people to be tortured, and in-person
guidance by American instructors.
Where does
the United States get the nerve to moralize about
Russia? Same place they get the nerve to label Putin
a “killer” … a “butcher” … a “thug”. It would be
difficult to name a world-renowned killer, butcher,
or thug – not to mention dictator, mass murderer, or
torturer – of the past 75 years who was not a close
ally of Washington.
So why then
does the American power elite hate Putin so? It can
be dated back to the period of Boris Yeltsin.
During the
Western financial looting of the dying Soviet Union
the US could be found meddling in favor of Yeltsin
in the election held in 1996. Under Yeltsin’s reign,
poverty exploded and life expectancy for men
actually decreased by five years, all in the name of
“shock therapy.” The US/Western-backed
destabilization of the Soviet Union allowed global
capitalism to spread its misery unfettered by any
inconvenient socialism. Russia came under the
control of oligarchs concerned only for their own
enrichment and that of their billionaire partners in
the West. The transition of power to Vladimir Putin
in the 21st century led to a number of reforms that
curbed the disastrous looting of the nation by the
oligarchic bandits. Putin and his allies vowed to
build an independent, capitalist Russia that was
capable of determining its own affairs free from US
and Western domination. Such an orientation placed
Putin in direct confrontation with US imperialism’s
plans for unipolar global hegemony.
Washington’s disdain for Putin increased when he
derided US war propaganda leading up to the invasion
of Iraq in 2003. Then, the Russian leader played a
crucial role in getting Iran to curtail its nuclear
program and arranging for Syria to surrender its
stockpiles of chemical weapons. Washington’s
powerful neo-conservatives had been lusting for
direct US military strikes against those two
countries, leading to regime change, not diplomatic
agreements that left the governments in place.
Lastly,
after the United States overthrew the Ukrainian
government in 2014, Putin was obliged to intervene
on behalf of threatened ethnic Russians in Crimea
and eastern Ukraine. That, in turn, was transformed
by the Western media into a “Russian invasion”.
The same
Western media has routinely charged Putin with
murdering journalists but doesn’t remind its
audience of the American record in this regard. The
American military, in the course of its wars in
recent decades, has been responsible for the
deliberate deaths of many journalists. In Iraq, for
example, there’s the Wikileaks 2007 video, exposed
by Chelsea Manning, of the cold-blooded murder of
two Reuters journalists; the 2003 US air-to-surface
missile attack on the offices of Al Jazeera in
Baghdad that left three journalists dead and four
wounded; and the American firing on Baghdad’s Hotel
Palestine, a known journalist residence, the same
year that killed two foreign news cameramen.
The Trump
honeymoon is over for me. It was never actually
love; hardly more than an intriguing curiosity;
mainly that he wasn’t Hillary Clinton; that he was
unlikely to start a war with Russia or close down
the Russia Today (RT) TV station in the US,
which I and many others depend on daily; and that he
was not politically correct when it came to fighting
the Islamic State. Trump’s “moral equivalency”
remark above gave me some hope. But this all
vanished with his appointment to high office of one
war-loving, bemedalled general after another,
intermingled with one billionaire Goldman-Sachs
official after another; his apparent confirmation of
his Mexican Wall; and, worst of all, his increasing
the military budget by $54 billion (sic, sick) …
this will certainly be at the expense of human life
and health and the environment. What manner of man
is this who walks amongst us?
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The word is
“narcissism”. New York Times columnist
Frank Bruni (February 28, 2017) captures this well:
“Why do I get the sense that fighter jets are Donald
Trump’s biceps, warships are his pectorals and what
he’s doing with his proposed $54 billion increase
for the Pentagon is flexing?”
Will there
ever be an end to the never-ending American wars?
How should we react to terrorism?
I hadn’t
planned on returning to this subject so soon, if
ever, because of the distasteful experience of last
summer when at least 50 of my subscribers canceled
because I said that terrorism carried out by
Islamics was to some extent motivated by their
religion, an hypothesis rejected by what I see as
the “politically correct” who took it to be an
unjust attack upon an ancient and noble religion.
The fact that I, a leftist, a comrade, would say
such a thing was especially hard for them to take.
Since then
I have regularly received emails pointing out that
neither I nor the media have the right to
categorically condemn brutal terrorist actions
because the terrorists are reacting to decades of
Western, particularly American, violence against the
Muslims of the Middle East and elsewhere; and that
if only the West would stop their bombing they would
stop creating new terrorists. Liberal columnists
often echo these sentiments, but at the same time
cannot accept the role played by radical Islamic
beliefs in instigating the Islamic terror.
Not every
American soldier in World War II was a knowledgable
and convinced anti-fascist; nor were all of those
fighting in Vietnam knowledgable and convinced
anti-communists; but they deeply believed in
American exceptionalism. I proceed from the
assumption that Islamic terrorists deeply believe in
the leading tenets of Islam though many of them may
have been drawn to ISIS for a variety of reasons and
may have only a passing knowledge of the Koran and
may only rarely enter a mosque.
Why is it
that terrorists routinely shout “Allah Akhbar” (“God
is great”) while carrying out a bloody attack?
Why is it
that so much of Islam teaches that non-Muslims are
the enemy, that “disbelievers” are to be executed?
Why do they
speak of their duty to perform “jihad”, which is
usually defined as a struggle against the enemies of
Islam or against the “infidels”?
Why do they
speak of “martyrs”, which is often used as an
honorific for Muslims who have died fulfilling a
religious commandment, especially those who die
waging jihad, or historically in the military
expansion of Islam?
Why do they
speak of martyrs going to paradise after dying and
receiving heavenly rewards? Even being resurrected
on earth, to once again die as a martyr, going again
to paradise.
Yes, yes, I
know about the terrible crimes of the IRA Catholics
and the Israeli Jews, but on the scale of human
moral evolution they don’t compare to the routine
cutting off of heads; the whippings; demolishing
2000-year-old monuments; sternly banning alcohol,
music, gays and sex; covering up women’s faces;
forcibly imposing religious law; and on and on,
including the worst of all: the never-ending
horrific suicide bombings. ISIS has done the
impossible: It has made American foreign policy look
almost halfway decent.
Occasionally I reply to critics with something to
this effect: Even if I completely accepted your
premises, I’d still feel that it was too late. We
can’t undo the harm that US foreign policy and the
West have caused. The barn door is wide open and all
the horses have escaped. There is an entire
generation, or two generations, in the Muslim world
totally committed to gaining bloody revenge against
the West. It appears to be that it’s either us or
them.
Explaining
the cause of terrorism is not the same as excusing
it.
It might be
different if the terrorists focused on killing only
those in the West responsible for the horror carried
out against their people, but their acts of violence
are largely indiscriminate; they attack Westerners
at random, often with Muslim victims included; often
with only Muslim victims.
As I’ve
pointed out in the past, we should consider this:
From the 1950s to the 1980s the United States
carried out all kinds of very harmful policies
against Latin America, including numerous bombings,
without the natives ever resorting to the
uncivilized, barbaric kind of retaliation as
employed by ISIS. Latin American leftists generally
took their revenge out upon concrete representatives
of the American empire: diplomatic, military and
corporate targets – not markets, theatres,
nightclubs, hospitals, schools, restaurants or
churches.
France, the
site of numerous terrorist attacks, has experimented
with deradicalization centers in an attempt to
combat homegrown extremism. The centers subjected
those they housed to intense courses in French
history and philosophy. But after five months the
experiment has been abandoned as a complete failure.
(8)
My guess is
that one reason for the failure is that French
officials, like their American counterparts, were
too politically correct when it came to questions of
religion. If I were a teacher at one of these
centers I would ask the students how they know – I
mean really know – that “martyrs” go to
paradise. They are, after all, considering
sacrificing their lives for this belief. Seriously
confronting this question for perhaps the first time
ever, the students’ minds may well become somewhat
confused, leaving them open for other challenging
questions and thoughts.
For the
record: I don’t support the US fighting ISIS in
Syria. I don’t trust the Pentagon’s motivation, or
their choice of bombing targets. They’re probably
still into regime change. I’d leave the job to
Russia and its allies.
William
Blum is the author of: Killing Hope: US Military and
CIA Interventions Since World War 2. Rogue State: A
Guide to the World's Only Superpower. West-Bloc
Dissident: A Cold War Memoir. Freeing the World to
Death: Essays on the American Empire. Portions of
the books can be read, and signed copies purchased,
at
www.killinghope.org - BBlum6@aol.com
Notes
The
views expressed in this article are solely those of the author and do not necessarily
reflect the opinions of Information Clearing
House.
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