If
Truth Cannot Prevail Over Material Agendas We
Are Doomed
By Paul Craig Roberts
December
24, 2018 "Information
Clearing House"
-
Throughout the long Cold War
Stephen
Cohen,
professor of Russian studies at Princeton
University and New York University was a voice
of reason. He refused to allow his patriotism to
blind him to Washington’s contribution to the
confict and to criticize only the Soviet
contribution. Cohen’s interest was not to blame
the enemy but to work toward a mutual
understanding that would remove the threat of
nuclear war. Although a Democrat and
left-leaning, Cohen would have been at home in
the Reagan administration, as Reagan’s first
priority was to end the Cold War. I know this
because I was part of the effort. Pat Buchanan
will tell you the same thing.
In 1974
a notorious cold warrior, Albert Wohlstetter,
absurdly accused the CIA of underestimating the
Soviet threat. As the CIA had every incentive
for reasons of budget and power to overestimate
the Soviet threat, and today the “Russian
threat,” Wohlstetter’s accusation made no sense
on its face. However he succeeded in stirring up
enough concern that CIA director George H.W.
Bush, later Vice President and President, agreed
to a Team B to investigate the CIA’s assessment,
headed by the Russiaphobic Harvard professor
Richard Pipes. Team B concluded that the Soviets
thought they could win a nuclear war and were
building the forces with which to attack the US.
The
report was mainly nonsense, and it must have
have troubled Stephen Cohen to experience the
setback to negotiations that Team B caused.
Today
Cohen is stressed that it is the United States
that thinks it can win a nuclear war. Washington
speaks openly of using “low yield” nuclear
weapons, and intentionally forecloses any peace
negotiations with Russia with a propaganda
campaign against Russia of demonization,
villification, and transparant lies, while
installing missile bases on Russia’s borders and
while talking of incorporating former parts of
Russia into NATO. In his just published book,
War With Russia?, which I highly
recommend, Cohen makes a convincing case that
Washington is asking for war.
|
Are You Tired Of
The Lies And
Non-Stop Propaganda?
|
I agree
with Cohen that if Russia is a threat it is only
because the US is threatening Russia. The
stupidity of the policy toward Russia is
creating a Russian threat. Putin keeps
emphasizing this. To paraphrase Putin: “You are
making Russia a threat by declaring us to be
one, by discarding facts and substituting
orchestrated opinions that your propagandistic
media establish as fact via endless repetition.”
Cohen
is correct that during the Cold War every US
president worked to defuse tensions, especially
Republican ones. Since the Clinton regime every
US president has worked to create tensions. What
explains this dangerous change in approach?
The end
of the Cold War was disadvantageous to the
military/security complex whose budget and power
had waxed from decades of cold war. Suddenly the
enemy that had bestowed such wealth and prestige
on the military/security complex disappeared.
The New
Cold War is the result of the military/security
complex’s resurrection of the enemy. In a
democracy with independent media and scholars,
this would not have been possible. But the
Clinton regime permitted in violation of
anti-trust laws 90% of the US media to be
concentrated in the hands of six
mega-corporations, thus destroying an
independence already undermined by the CIA’s
successful use of the CIA’s media assets to
control explanations. Many books have been
written about the CIA’s use of the media,
including Udo Ulfkotte’s “Bought Journalism,”
the English edition of which was quickly
withdrawn and burned.
The
demonization of Russia is also aided and abeted
by the Democrats’ hatred of Trump and anger from
Hillary’s loss of the presidential election to
the “Trump deplorables.” The Democrats purport
to believe that Trump was installed by Putin’s
interference in the presidentail election. This
false belief is emotionally important to
Democrats, and they can’t let go of it.
Although Cohen as a professor at Princeton and
NYU never lacked research opportunities, in the
US Russian studies, strategic studies, and the
like are funded by the military/security complex
whose agenda Cohen’s scholarship does not serve.
At the Center for Strategic and International
Studies, where I held an independently financed
chair for a dozen years, most of my colleagues
were dependent on grants from the
military/security complex. At the Hoover
Institution, Stanford University, where I was a
Senior Fellow for three decades, the anti-Soviet
stance of the Institution reflected the agenda
of those who funded the institution.
I am
not saying that my colleagues were whores on a
payroll. I am saying that the people who got the
appointments were people who were inclined to
see the Soviet Union the way the
military/security complex thought it should be
seen.
As
Stephen Cohen is aware, in the original Cold War
there was some balance as all explanations were
not controlled. There were independent scholars
who could point out that the Soviets, decimated
by World War 2, had an interest in peace, and
that accommodation could be achieved, thus
avoiding the possibility of nuclear war.
Stephen
Cohen must have been in the younger ranks of
those sensible people, as he and President
Reagan’s ambassador to the Soviet Union, Jack
Matloff, seem to be the remaining voices of
expert reason on the American scene.
If you
care to understand the dire threat under which
you live, a threat that only a few people, such
as Stephen Cohen, are trying to lift, read his
book.
If you
want to understand the dire threat that a
bought-and-paid-for American media poses to your
existence, read Cohen’s accounts of their
despicable lies. America has a media that is
synonymous with lies.
If you
want to understand how corrupt American
universities are as organizations on the take
for money, organizations to whom truth is
inconsequential, read Cohen’s book.
If you
want to understand why you could be dead before
Global Warming can get you, read Cohen’s book.
Enough
said.
Dr. Paul Craig Roberts was Assistant Secretary of
the Treasury for Economic Policy and associate
editor of the Wall Street Journal. He was
columnist for Business Week, Scripps Howard News
Service, and Creators Syndicate. He has had many
university appointments. His internet columns
have attracted a worldwide following. Roberts'
latest books are
The Failure of Laissez Faire
Capitalism and Economic Dissolution of the West,
How America Was Lost,
and
The Neoconservative Threat to
World Order.
The
views expressed in this article are solely those
of the author and do not necessarily reflect the
opinions of Information Clearing House.
