Cold War then. Cold War now.
By
William Blum
September
27, 2017 "Information
Clearing House"
- The anti-Russian/anti-Soviet bias in the American
media appears to have no limit. You would think that
they would have enough self-awareness and enough
journalistic integrity -– just enough -– to be
concerned about their image. But it keeps on coming,
piled higher and deeper.
One of the
latest cases in point is a review of a new biography
of Mikhail Gorbachev in the New York Times Book
Review (September 10). The review says that
Gorbachev “was no hero to his own people” because he
was “the destroyer of their empire”. This is how the
New York Times avoids having to say
anything positive about life in the Soviet Union or
about socialism. They would have readers believe
that it was the loss of the likes of Czechoslovakia
or Hungary et al. that upset the Russian people, not
the loss, under Gorbachev’s perestroika, of
a decent standard of living for all, a loss
affecting people’s rent, employment, vacations,
medical care, education, and many other aspects of
the Soviet welfare state.
Accompanying this review is a quote from a 1996
Times review of Gorbachev’s own memoir, which
said: “It mystifies Westerners that Mikhail
Gorbachev is loathed and ridiculed in his own
country. This is the man who pulled the world
several steps back from the nuclear brink and lifted
a crushing fear from his countrymen, who ended
bloody foreign adventures [and] liberated Eastern
Europe. … Yet his repudiation at home could hardly
be more complete. His political comeback attempt in
June attracted less than 1 percent of the vote.”
Thus is
Gorbachev’s unpopularity with his own people further
relegated to the category of “mystery”, and not due
to the profound social changes.
It should
be noted that in 1999, USA Today reported:
“When the Berlin Wall crumbled [1989], East Germans
imagined a life of freedom where consumer goods were
abundant and hardships would fade. Ten years later,
a remarkable 51% say they were happier with
communism.”
Earlier polls
would likely have shown even more than 51%
expressing such a sentiment, for in the ten years
many of those who remembered life in East Germany
with some fondness had passed away; although even 10
years later, in 2009, the Washington Post
could report: “Westerners [West Berliners] say they
are fed up with the tendency of their eastern
counterparts to wax nostalgic about communist
times.”
It was in the
post-unification period that a new Russian and
eastern Europe proverb was born: “Everything the
Communists said about Communism was a lie, but
everything they said about capitalism turned out to
be the truth.”
The current
New York Times review twice refers to
Vladimir Putin as “authoritarian”, as does,
routinely, much of the Western media. None of the
many such references I have come across in recent
years has given an example of such authoritarian
policies, although such examples of course exist, as
they do under a man named Trump and a woman named
May and every other government in the world. But
clearly if a strong case could be made of Putin
being authoritarian, the Western media would
routinely document such in their attacks upon the
Russian president. Why do they not?
The review
further refers to Putin to as “the cold-eye former
K.G.B. lieutenant colonel”. One has to wonder if the
New York Times has ever referred to
President George H.W. Bush as “the cold-eye former
CIA Director”.
Just as in
the first Cold War, one of the basic problems is
that Americans have great difficulty in believing
that Russians mean well. Apropos this, I’d like to
recall the following written about George Kennan,
one of the most prominent American diplomats ever:
Crossing Poland with the first US diplomatic
mission to the Soviet Union in the winter of
1933, a young American diplomat named George
Kennan was somewhat astonished to hear the
Soviet escort, Foreign Minister Maxim Litvinov,
reminisce about growing up in a village nearby,
about the books he had read and his dreams as a
small boy of being a librarian.
“We
suddenly realized, or at least I did, that these
people we were dealing with were human beings
like ourselves,” Kennan wrote, “that they had
been born somewhere, that they had their
childhood ambitions as we had. It seemed for a
brief moment we could break through and embrace
these people.”
It hasn’t
happened yet.
Kennan’s
sudden realization brings George Orwell to mind: “We
have now sunk to a depth at which the restatement of
the obvious is the first duty of intelligent men.”
The plague of nationalism
The world
has enough countries. Too goddamn many if you ask
me. Is there room for any more delegations at the
United Nations? Any more parking spots in New York?
Have the people of Catalonia, who are seeking
independence from Spain in an October 1 vote,
considered that their new nation will have to open
hundreds of new embassies and consulates
around the world, furnish them all, fill them all
with paid employees, houses and apartments and
furniture for many of them, several new cars for
each diplomatic post. … How many billions of dollars
in taxes will be taken from the Catalan people to
pay for all this?
And what
about the military? Any self-respecting country
needs an army and a navy. Will the new Catalonia be
able to afford even halfway decent armed forces? The
new country will of course have to join NATO with
its obligatory minimum defense capability. There
goes a billion or two more.
Plus what
it will have to pay the European Union, which will
simply be replacing Madrid in imposing many legal
restrictions upon the Catalan people.
And for
what noble purpose are they rising up? Freedom,
democracy, civil liberties, human rights? No. It’s
all for money. Madrid is taking in more in taxes
from Catalonia than it returns in services,
something which can be said about many city-state
relationships in the United States. (Presumably
there are also some individual Catalans who have
their odd personal reasons.)
Catalan
nationalists insist that “self-determination” is an
inalienable right and cannot be curbed by the
Spanish Constitution.
Well, then,
why stop with an “autonomous community” as Catalonia
is designated? Why don’t provinces everywhere have
the right to declare their independence? How about
cities? Or neighborhoods? Why not my block? I could
be the president.
And there
are many other restive independence movements in the
world, like the Kurds in Iraq and Turkey; in
Scotland, Belgium and Italy; and California. Lord
help us. Many countries are very reluctant to even
recognize a new state for fear that it might
encourage their own people to break away.
If love is
blind, nationalism has lost all five senses.
“If nature were a bank, they
would have already rescued it.” – Eduardo Galeano
U.S.
Treasury Secretary Steven Mnuchin told a New York
investor conference that Hurricane Irma would
ultimately boost the economy by sparking rebuilding.
“There clearly is going to be an impact on GDP in
the short run, we will make it up in the long run.
As we rebuild, that will help GDP. It won’t have a
bad impact on the economy.”
Hmmm … very
interesting … Can we therefore assume that if the
damage had been twice as bad it would have boosted
the economy even more?
Meanwhile,
in the non-Trump, non-fantasy world, there is a
thing called climate change; i.e. the quality of our
lives, the survival of the planet. What keeps
corporations from modifying their behavior so as to
be kinder to our environment? It is of course the
good old “bottom line” again. What can we do to
convince the corporations to consistently behave
like good citizens? Nothing that hasn’t already been
tried and failed. Except one thing. … unmentionable
in polite company. … unmentionable in a capitalist
society. … Nationalization. There, I said it. Now
I’ll be getting letters addressed to “The Old
Stalinist”.
But
nationalization is not a panacea either, at least
for the environment. There’s the greatest single
source of man-made environmental damage in the world
– The United States military. And it’s already been
nationalized. But doing away with private
corporations will reduce the drive toward
imperialism sufficiently that before long the need
for a military will fade away and we can live like
Costa Rica. If you think that that would put the
United States in danger of attack, please tell me
who would attack, and why.
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The
argument I like to use when speaking to those who
don’t accept the idea that extreme weather phenomena
are man-made is this:
Well, we
can proceed in one of two ways:
- We can
do our best to limit the greenhouse effect by
curtailing greenhouse gas emissions (carbon
dioxide, methane, and nitrous oxide) into the
atmosphere, and if it turns out that these
emissions were not in fact the cause of all the
extreme weather phenomena, then we’ve wasted a
lot of time, effort and money (although other
benefits to the ecosystem would still accrue).
- We can
do nothing at all to curtail the emission of
greenhouse gases into the atmosphere, and if it
turns out that these emissions were in fact the
leading cause of all the extreme weather
phenomena (not simply extreme, but getting
downright freaky), then we’ve lost the earth and
life as we know it.
So, are you
a gambler?
The new Vietnam documentary
At the
beginning of Ken Burns’ new documentary on the
American war in Vietnam the narrator says the war
“was begun in good faith by decent people out of
fateful misunderstandings, American overconfidence
and Cold War misunderstandings.”
The early
American involvement in Vietnam can be marked by two
things in particular: (1) helping the French
imperialists in their fight against the forces led
by Ho Chi Minh of North Vietnam and (2) the
cancellation of the elections that would have united
North and South Vietnam as one nation because the US
and its South Vietnam allies knew that Ho Chi Minh
would win. It was that simple.
Nothing of
good faith or decency in that scenario. No
misunderstandings. Ho Chi Minh was a great admirer
of America and its Declaration of Independence. His
own actual declaration of 1945 begins with the
familiar “All men are created equal. They are
endowed by their Creator with certain inalienable
rights, among these are Life, Liberty and the
pursuit of Happiness.” But Ho Chi Minh was what was
called a “communist”. It was that simple. (See the
Vietnam chapter in my book Killing Hope for
the details.)
Daniel
Ellsberg’s conclusion about the US in Vietnam: “It
wasn’t that we were on the wrong side; we were
the wrong side.”
Ms. Hillary
She has a
new book out and lots of interviews, all giving her
the opportunity to complain about the many forces
that joined together to deny her her rightful place
as queen. I might feel a bit, just a bit, of
sympathy for the woman if not for her greatest
crime.
There was a
country called Libya. It had the highest standard of
living in all of Africa; its people had not only
free education and health care but all kinds of
other benefits that other Africans could only dream
about. It was also a secular state, a quality to be
cherished in Africa and the Middle East. But Moammar
Gaddafi of Libya was never a properly obedient
client of Washington. Amongst other shortcomings,
the man threatened to replace the US dollar with
gold for payment of oil transactions, create a
common African currency, and was a strong supporter
of the Palestinians and foe of Israel.
In 2011,
Secretary of State Hillary Clinton was the prime
moving force behind the United States and NATO
turning Libya into a failed state, where it remains
today.
The attack
against Libya was one that the New York Times
said Clinton had “championed”, convincing President
Obama in “what was arguably her moment of greatest
influence as Secretary of State.”
The people of
Libya were bombed almost daily for more than six
months. The main excuse given was that Gaddafi was
about to invade Benghazi, the Libyan center of his
opponents, and so the United States and NATO were
thus saving the people of that city from a massacre.
The American people and the American media of course
swallowed this story, though no convincing evidence
of the alleged impending massacre has ever been
presented. The nearest thing to an official US
government account of the matter – a Congressional
Research Service report on events in Libya for the
period – makes no mention at all of the threatened
massacre.
The US/NATO
heavy bombing sent Libya crashing in utter chaos,
leading to the widespread dispersal throughout North
African and Middle East hotspots of the gigantic
arsenal of weaponry that Gaddafi had accumulated.
Libya is now a haven for terrorists, from al Qaeda
to ISIS, whereas Gaddafi had been a leading foe of
terrorists. He had declared Libya as a barrier to
terrorists, as well as African refugees, going to
Europe.
The bombing
has contributed greatly to the area’s mammoth
refugee crisis.
And when
Hillary was shown a video about the horrific murder
of Gaddafi by his opponents she loudly cackled (yes,
that’s the word): “We came, we saw, he died!” You
can see it on Youtube.
There’s
also her support of placing regime change in Syria
ahead of supporting the Syrian government in its
struggle against ISIS and other terrorist groups.
Even more disastrous was the 2003 US invasion of
Iraq which she as a senator supported.
If all this
is not sufficient to capture the utter charm of the
woman, another foreign-policy adventure, one which
her swooning followers totally ignore, the few that
even know about it, is the coup ousting the
moderately progressive Manuel Zelaya of Honduras in
June, 2009. A tale told many times in Latin America:
The downtrodden masses finally put into power a
leader committed to reversing the status quo,
determined to try to put an end to two centuries of
oppression … and before long the military overthrows
the democratically-elected government, while the
United States – if not the mastermind behind the
coup – does nothing to prevent it or to punish the
coup regime, as only the United States can punish;
meanwhile Washington officials pretend to be very
upset over this “affront to democracy”.
District of Columbia
How many
people around the world know that in Washington, DC
(District of Columbia, where I live), the capital
city of the United States –- the country that is
always lecturing the world about this thing called
“democracy” –- the citizens do not have the final
say over making the laws that determine life in
their city? Many Americans as well are not aware of
this.
According
to the US Constitution (Section 8) Congress has the
final say, and in recent years has blocked the city
from using local tax dollars to subsidize abortion
for low-income women, blocked the implementation of
legal marijuana use, blocked needle exchanges,
blocked certain taxes, blocked a law that says
employers cannot discriminate against workers based
on their reproductive decisions, imposed private
schools into the public-school system, and will soon
probably block the District’s new assisted-suicide
law (already blocked in the House of
Representatives). On top of all this, since DC is
not a state, its citizens do not have any
representatives in the Senate and their sole
representative in the House has only the barest
non-voting, token rights. DC residents did not even
have the right to vote for the president until 1964.
In 2015 in
Brussels, the Unrepresented Nations and Peoples
Organization formally voted to accept the District
of Columbia as a new member. UNPO is an
international democratic organization whose members
are indigenous peoples, minorities and unrecognized
or occupied territories who have joined together to
protect and promote their human and cultural rights,
to preserve their environments and to find
nonviolent solutions to conflicts which affect them.
William
Blum is an American author, historian, and critic of
United States foreign policy.
https://williamblum.org/books/killing-hope
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