COLLECTED BY DICK BENNETT FOR A CULTURE OF PEACE, JUSTICE, AND ECOLOGY
The history of US anticommunism has been voluminously reported; the following selection has been randomly collected.
CONTENTS
Books (I have ask UAF’s Mullins Library to order them)
Dominic Basulto. Russophobia : How Western Media Turns Russia Into the Enemy. 2015.
Dan Kovalik. The Plot to Scapegoat Russia: How the CIA and the Deep State Have Conspired to Vilify Putin. 2017.
Guy Mettan. From the Great Religious Schism to Anti-Putin Hysteria. 2017.
Articles
Anti-Russian sentiment. Wikipedia
Russia Hating. The Nation.
Biden Administration’s National Security Strategy. The Editors. Monthly Review.
Anne Braden. Commie Witch-Hunting.
John Walsh. Post-Cold War Assaul
Jeffrey Sachs: “Dangerous” U.S. Policy & “West’s False Narrative”
Gilbert Doctorow. “Dehumanizing the enemy.”
Jeremy Kuzmarov. “Outrageous Brainwashing Event…Deliberately Falsifies History to Inflame American Hatred Against Russia and China.”
Ray McGovern. “Brainwashed for War with Russia.”
Margaret Flowers, “Anti-Russian Hysteria.”
Richard S. Dunn. “Old Russian Bogeyman”
Even Reif. Better Nazi Murderers than Communists.
BOOKS
I grew up between the first Red Scare of 1917 and the Cold War, a story told entertainingly with short texts and many photos in “Better Dead Than Red.” The following 3 books bring that history up to the present and are on order at UAF’s Mullins Library.–Dick
Dominic Basulto. Russophobia : How Western Media Turns Russia Into the Enemy. 2015.
Dan Kovalik. The Plot to Scapegoat Russia: How the CIA and the Deep State Have Conspired to Vilify Putin. 2017.
Guy Mettan. From the Great Religious Schism to Anti-Putin Hysteria. Atlanta, GA : Clarity Press, 2017.
Dominic Basulto. Russophobia : How Western Media Turns Russia Into the Enemy. 2015.
The current Russophobia in the Western media should not come as a big surprise. During the Cold War era, the stereotype of dour, unsmiling Russians victimized by a ruthless, authoritarian regime that posed an existential nuclear threat to the West became a mainstay of the media narrative. Even after the end of the Cold War, Russophobia continued to influence the way the West viewed Russia. This book attempts to understand how Russophobia within the Western media during the Putin era (2000-2015) led to a new Cold War between Russia and the West that includes elements of information, cyber and economic warfare. Russophobia attempts to answer the following questions: Why are any attempts by Russia to change the Western media narrative immediately derided as propaganda? What do Western policymakers get wrong about the Kremlin’s motives? And, most importantly: Is there a cure for Russophobia?
Publisher:The Druzhba Project, [The United States of America], 2015
Duke University Library; Perkins Library
Dominic Basulto is the U.S. Executive Editor of Russia Direct. He has written extensively on Russian foreign policy and holds an undergraduate degree from Princeton and an MBA from Yale. More by author
Russia Direct Guidebook to Russian Foreign Policy
By Alexey Dolinskiy , Alexei Pilko, George Joffé, Mark Katz , Alexander Sharavin, and more.
The Russia Direct Guidebook to Russian Foreign Policy, including work by prominent international experts, looks back at some of the defining moments in Moscow’s relations with the world over the …
Dan Kovalik. The Plot to Scapegoat Russia: How the CIA and the Deep State Have Conspired to Vilify Putin. Introduction by David Talbot. Skyhorse, 2017.
Publisher’s Description
An in-depth look at the decades-long effort to escalate hostilities with Russia and what it portends for the future.
Since 1945, the US has justified numerous wars, interventions, and military build-ups based on the pretext of the Russian Red Menace, even after the Soviet Union collapsed at the end of 1991 and Russia stopped being Red. In fact, the two biggest post-war American conflicts, the Korean and Vietnam wars, were not, as has been frequently claimed, about stopping Soviet aggression or even influence, but about maintaining old colonial relationships. Similarly, many lesser interventions and conflicts, such as those in Latin America, were also based upon an alleged Soviet threat, which was greatly overblown or nonexistent. And now the specter of a Russian Menace has been raised again in the wake of Donald Trump’s election.
The Plot to Scapegoat Russia examines the recent proliferation of stories, usually sourced from American state actors, blaming and manipulating the threat of Russia, and the long history of which this episode is but the latest chapter. It will show readers two key things: (1) the ways in which the United States has needlessly provoked Russia, especially after the collapse of the USSR, thereby squandering hopes for peace and cooperation; and (2) how Americans have lost out from this missed opportunity, and from decades of conflicts based upon false premises. These revelations, amongst other, make The Plot to Scapegoat Russia one of the timeliest reads of 2017.
Guy Mettan. From the Great Religious Schism to Anti-Putin Hysteria. Atlanta, GA : Clarity Press, 2017. 390.
Articles
Anti-Russian sentiment – Wikipedia
https://en.wikipedia.org › wiki › Anti-Russian_sentiment
Anti-Russian sentiment, commonly referred to as Russophobia, is dislike or fear of Russia, the Russians, Russian culture, or Russian policy.
History · 2022 Russian invasion of… · By country · Within Russia
Russia Hating: A Study of the News—and Views—We Find Fit …
https://www.thenation.com › Article
Oct 31, 2022 — This Russia hovers between barbarism and modernity, between Asia and Europe, an uncertain profile that has long troubled the Western mind. But …
“Notes from the Editors. ” Monthly Review. December 2022 (Volume 74, Number 7). buy this issue
This month’s “Notes from the Editors” takes on the Biden Administration’s recently released National Security Strategy, a bellicose document that rattles sabers towards the supposed autocracies of Russia and China while reviving the age-old lie of the United States as protector of democracy. | more…
CovertAction Magazine via gmail.mcsv.net Gilbert Doctorow. “Dehumanizing the enemy.”
Mronline.org (12-30-22).
The word “Russophobia” has been used very widely in the past couple of years by Russians and by “friends of Russia” abroad to describe the campaign of vilification of President Putin in particular and of the Russian people more generally that the U.S. led West has practiced with rising volume and shrillness ever since the start of an Information War launched in 2007.
Jeremy Kuzmarov. Outrageous Brainwashing Event—Sponsored By Bush Institute and CIA-Backed National Endowment for Democracy (NED)—Deliberately Falsifies History to Inflame American Hatred Against Russia and China. CovertAction Magazine. Nov 22, 2022.
Head of International Republican Institute Dan Twining ridiculously compares Putin-Xi meeting to Ribbentrop-Molotov Pact between Hitler and Stalin, while former Under Secretary of State for Global Affairs accuses Russia of igniting protests in Chile
Russia-bashing was in full vogue at a conference at the George W. Bush Institute in Dallas co-hosted by the National Endowment for Democracy (NED) on November 16, whose purpose was to mobilize public support for the war in Ukraine.
During the first panel, Dan Twining of the International Republican Institute, which supports right-wing parties worldwide, outrageously compared a February 2022 summit between Russian President Vladimir Putin and Chinese Premier Xi Xinping to the Ribbentrop-Molotov Pact between the Nazis and Soviet Union during World War II.
The chair of the panel, Paula Dobriansky, Under Secretary of State for Global Affairs from 2001 to 2009 and the daughter of an ally of Nazi collaborator Stepan Bandera,[1] blamed Russia for igniting popular protests in Chile through the spread of disinformation on social media.
President George W. Bush continued the Russia-bashing in his keynote address in which he called Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky a “tough guy” whom history “will judge as a remarkable leader.”
Bush went on to suggest that there is “an isolationist tendency in the U.S.” which, if it ever prevailed, would “make the world far more dangerous,” as U.S. leadership was “vital for collective action against autocracy around the world.”
Bush said that “the George W. Bush Institute were [sic] big believers in Ukrainian freedom,” and wanted to help the “young democracy” from being “bullied by its neighbor, an autocrat.”
This was crucial to U.S. national security because “what will Europe look like if Vladimir Putin conquers Ukraine? Next would be the Baltics.” […]
Ray McGovern. “Brainwashed for War with Russia.” Antiwar.com on September 22, 2022 (more by Antiwar.com) (Posted Sep 26, 2022).
WarEurope, Russia, UkraineNewsRussia-Ukraine War
Thanks to Establishment media, the sorcerer apprentices advising President Joe Biden—I refer to Secretary of State Antony Blinken, national security adviser Jacob Sullivan, and China specialist Kurt Campbell—will have no trouble rallying Americans for the widest war in 77 years, starting in Ukraine, and maybe spreading to China. And, shockingly, under false pretenses.
Most Americans are oblivious to the reality that Western media are owned and operated by the same corporations that make massive profits by helping to stoke small wars and then peddling the necessary weapons. Corporate leaders, and Ivy-mantled elites, educated to believe in U.S. “exceptionalism,” find the lucre and the luster too lucrative to be able to think straight. They deceive themselves into thinking that (a) the U.S. cannot lose a war; (b) escalation can be calibrated and wider war can be limited to Europe; and (c) China can be expected to just sit on the sidelines. The attitude, consciously or unconsciously,
Not to worry. And, in any case, the lucre and luster are worth the risk.
The media also know they can always trot out died-in-the-wool Russophobes to “explain,” for example, why the Russians are “almost genetically driven” to do evil (James Clapper, former National Intelligence Director and now hired savant on CNN); or Fiona Hill (former National Intelligence Officer for Russia), who insists “Putin wants to evict the United States from Europe … As he might put it:
Goodbye, America. Don’t let the door hit you on the way out.
Absent a miraculous appearance of clearer heads with a less benighted attitude toward the core interests of Russia in Ukraine, and China in Taiwan, historians who survive to record the war now on our doorstep will describe it as the result of hubris and stupidity run amok. Objective historians may even note that one of their colleagues—Professor John Mearsheimer—got it right from the start, when he explained in the autumn 2014 issue of Foreign Affairs “Why the Ukraine Crisis is the West’s Fault.”
Historian Barbara Tuchman addressed the kind of situation the world faces in Ukraine in her book “The March of Folly: From Troy to Vietnam.” (Had she lived, she surely would have updated it to take Iraq, Afghanistan, Syria, and Ukraine into account). Tuchman wrote:
Wooden-headedness… plays a remarkably large role in government. It consists in assessing a situation in terms of preconceived fixed notions while ignoring or rejecting any contrary signs. It is acting according to wish while not allowing oneself to be deflected by the facts.
Six Years (and Counting) of Brainwashing
Thanks to U.S. media, a very small percentage of Americans know that:
·
· 14 years ago, then U.S. Ambassador to Russia (current CIA Director) William Burns was warned by Russian Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov that Russia might have to intervene in Ukraine, if it were made a member of NATO. The Subject Line of Burns’s Feb. 1, 2008 Embassy Moscow cable (#182) to Washington makes it clear that Amb. Burns did not mince Lavrov’s words; the subject line stated: “Nyet means nyet: Russia’s NATO enlargement redlines.” Thus, Washington policymakers were given forewarning, in very specific terms, of Russia’s redline regarding membership for Ukraine in NATO. Nevertheless, on April 3, 2008, a NATO summit in Bucharest asserted: “NATO welcomes Ukraine’s and Georgia’s Euro-Atlantic aspirations for membership in NATO. We agreed today that these countries will become members of NATO.”
· 8 years ago, on Feb. 22, 2014, the U.S. orchestrated a coup in Kiev—rightly labeled “the most blatant coup in history’, insofar as it had already been blown on YouTube 18 days prior. Kiev’s spanking new leaders, handpicked and identified by name by U.S. Assistant Secretary of State Victoria Nuland in the YouTube-publicized conversation with the U.S. ambassador in Kiev, immediately called for Ukraine to join NATO.
· 6 years ago, in June 2016, Russian President Vladimir Putin told Western reporters of his concern that so-called antiballistic missiles sites in Romania and Poland could be converted overnight to accommodate offensive strike missiles posing a threat to Russia’s own nuclear forces. (See this unique video, with English subtitles, from minute 37 to 49.) There is a direct analogy with the 1962 Cuban missile crisis when Moscow put offensive strike missiles in Cuba and President John Kennedy reacted strongly to the existential threat that posed to the U.S.
· On December 21, 2021, President Putin told his most senior military leaders:“It is extremely alarming that elements of the U.S. global defense system are being deployed near Russia. The Mk 41 launchers, which are located in Romania and are to be deployed in Poland, are adapted for launching the Tomahawk strike missiles. If this infrastructure continues to move forward, and if US and NATO missile systems are deployed in Ukraine, their flight time to Moscow will be only 7—10 minutes, or even five minutes for hypersonic systems. This is a huge challenge for us, for our security.” [Emphasis added.]
· On December 30, 2021, Biden and Putin talked by phone at Putin’s urgent request. The Kremlin readout stated:
“Joseph Biden emphasized that Russia and the U.S. shared a special responsibility for ensuring stability in Europe and the whole world and that Washington had no intention of deploying offensive strike weapons in Ukraine.” Yuri Ushakov, a top foreign policy adviser to Putin, pointed out that this was also one of the goals Moscow hoped to achieve with its proposals for security guarantees to the U.S. and NATO. [Emphasis added.]
On February 12, 2022, Ushakov briefed the media on the telephone conversation between Putin and Biden earlier that day.
The call was as a follow-up of sorts to the… December 30 telephone conversation… The Russian President made clear that President Biden’s proposals did not really address the central, key elements of Russia’s initiatives either with regards to non-expansion of NATO, or non-deployment of strike weapons systems on Ukrainian territory … To these items, we have received no meaningful response.” [Emphasis added.]
· On February 24, 2022, Russia invaded Ukraine.
Unprovoked?
The U.S. insists that Russia’s invasion was “unprovoked”. Establishment media dutifully regurgitate that line, while keeping Americans in the dark about such facts (not opinion) as are outlined (and sourced) above. Most Americans are just as taken in by the media as they were 20 years ago, when they were told there were weapons of mass destruction in Iraq. They simply took it on faith. Nor did the guilty media express remorse—or a modicum of embarrassment.
The late Fred Hiatt, who was op-ed editor at the Washington Post, is a case in point. In an interview with the Columbia Journalism Review [CJR, March/April 2004] he commented:
If you look at the editorials we wrote running up [to the war], we state as flat fact that he [Saddam Hussein] has weapons of mass destruction.
If that’s not true, it would have been better not to say it.
(My journalism mentor, Robert Parry, had this to say about Hiatt’s remark. “Yes, that is a common principle of journalism, that if something isn’t real, we’re not supposed to confidently declare that it is.”)
It’s worse now. Russia is not Iraq. And Putin has been so demonized over the past six years that people are inclined to believe the likes of James Clapper to the effect there’s something genetic that makes Russians evil. “Russia-gate” was a big con (and, now, demonstrably so), but Americans don’t know that either. The consequences of prolonged demonization are extremely dangerous—and will become even more so in the next several weeks as politicians vie to be the strongest in opposing and countering Russia’s “unprovoked” attack on Ukraine.
Anti-Russian Hysteria Used By FBI To Target Black Organizers
By Margaret Flowers, Clearing the FOG. Popular Resistance.org (8-9-22). On July 29, the FBI conducted a surprise raid on the homes and offices of leaders of the African People’s Socialist Party and Uhuru Solidarity Movement (APSP-Uhuru) in Florida and Missouri under the pretext that they were co-conspirators in an indictment of a Russian national, Alexander Ionov. In the raid, documents and electronic devices were stolen. The raid was coordinated with the Biden Administration. Clearing the FOG speaks with Chairman Omali Yeshitela of the APSP – Uhuru about the raid and the broader implications of it for activists in the United States. -more-
New Bill That Passed House Reinvokes Old Russian Bogeyman as Pretext For More U.S. Intervention in Africa
| CovertAction Magazine via gmail.mcsv.net | |
| Richard S. Dunn on Jun 14, 2022 07:40 am Liberal Democrats shamefully all voted for the “Countering Malign Russian Influence Activities in Africa” Act—seems like relic from bygone era During the Cold War, the U.S. government invoked the pretext of Russian interference to justify a range of crimes, including the assassination of Congolese Prime Minister Patrice Lumumba, the overthrow of Pan-Africanist hero Kwame Nkrumah, the arrest of Nelson Mandela and intervention in the Angolan civil war. Just when we thought that that era had passed, the House of Representatives on April 27 passed the “Countering Malign Russian Influence Activities in Africa” Act by a 415-9 vote. The bill in part would direct the U.S. Secretary of State, using “detailed intelligence,” to identify in Africa “local actors complicit in Russian activities.” The U.S. in turn may very well seek to punish those actors through economic sanctions or even regime change. “Russian aggression” is generally being invoked to justify greater U.S. intervention in Africa, including the expansion of the Africa Command (AFRICOM) and U.S. military base network across the continent. […] The post New Bill That Passed the House Reinvokes Old Russian Bogeyman as Pretext For More U.S. Intervention in Africa appeared first on CovertAction Magazine. Even Reif. “How monsters who beat Jews to death in 1944 became America’s favorite “Freedom Fighters” in 1945—with a little help from their friends at CIA (Part 2).” Mronline.org (6-14-22). After the end of the Second World War, American intelligence immediately set about the work of rehabilitating the world’s fascists to fight the new war on Communism. |
CONNECT SMITH’S HISTORY TO THAT OF US RUSSOPHOBIA?
Endless Holocausts
Mass Death in the History of the United States Empire
Published by: Monthly Review Press
Imprint: Monthly Review Press
Sales Date: January 2023
An argument against the myth of “American exceptionalism”
Endless Holocausts: Mass Death in the History of the United States Empire helps us to come to terms with what we have long suspected: the rise of the U.S. Empire has relied upon an almost unimaginable loss of life, from its inception during the European colonial period, to the present. And yet, in the face of a series of endless holocausts at home and abroad, the doctrine of American exceptionalism has plagued the globe for over a century.
However much the ruling class insists on U.S. superiority, we find ourselves in the midst of a sea change. Perpetual wars, deteriorating economic conditions, the resurgence of white supremacy, and the rise of the Far Right have led millions of people to abandon their illusions about this country. Never before have so many people rejected or questioned traditional platitudes about the United States.
In Endless Holocausts author David Michael Smith demolishes the myth of exceptionalism by demonstrating that manifold forms of mass death, far from being unfortunate exceptions to an otherwise benign historical record, have been indispensable in the rise of the wealthiest and most powerful imperium in the history of the world. At the same time, Smith points to an extraordinary history of resistance by Indigenous peoples, people of African descent, people in other nations brutalized by U.S. imperialism, workers, and democratic-minded people around the world determined to fight for common dignity and the sake of the greater good.
Can An American Scientist Who Smuggled Critical Nuclear Secrets to the Russians After World War II Be Considered a “Good Guy”? New Film Says Yes.
CovertAction Magazine via gmail.mcsv.net 12-2-22
By Ron Ridenour CovertAction. Dec 02, 2022 11:51 am
Controversial New Documentary Reveals How A Teenage Army Physicist Named Ted Hall Saved The Russian People From A Treacherous U.S. Sneak Attack In 1950-51—And May Well Have Prevented A Global Nuclear Holocaust
The provocative documentary “A Compassionate Spy” tells the amazing but almost unknown story of a “near-genius” 16 year-old Harvard junior physics major who was drafted to help develop an atom bomb at America’s ultra-secret Manhattan Project.
At 18, after graduating from Harvard, Ted was the youngest physicist to work on the atomic bombs at Los Alamos, New Mexico. He worked with uranium and the implosion system for the plutonium bomb used in the Trinity test on July 16, 1945, one month before that bomb type killed tens of thousands of civilians at Nagasaki.
Between the bombings at Hiroshima, August 6, and Nagasaki, August 9, somewhere around 200,000 civilians were killed, and a similar number died within some months afterwards from radiation sickness and injuries.
The film also illustrates why and how Ted shared his knowledge with the Soviets: to prevent a post-war U.S. perhaps heading toward fascism and/or world domination intoxicated by having a nuclear monopoly. He foresaw correctly because, by 1946, Wall Street bankers and weapons industrialists had convinced President Harry Truman, as the film shows, to produce 400 more atomic bombs to attack the Soviet Union in 1950-51, kill millions of its people, and take over its huge land and natural resources. […]
Everything You‘ve Always Wanted To Know About: ‘Good’ Wars, ‘Good’ War Criminals, ‘Good’ Dictators, ‘Good’ Separatists, ‘Good’ Oligarchs, ‘Good’ Money Launderers—And Their Antitheses!
By Felix Abt on Jul 19, 2022 02:12 pm
Everything Is Either Good or Evil!
When Saddam Hussein, Iraq’s president, invaded Iran on September 22, 1980, he was a “good” dictator. His invasion of the neighboring country was not only approved by the United States and its Western satellites, but also universally supported by them. Unlike secular Iraq, Iran was led by so-called vicious Islamic clerics.
They had committed the crime of spearheading a popular movement to overthrow Shah Reza Pahlavi, who had been swept into power by the Americans and the British but was abhorred by the Iranians. In the eyes of the American and British governments, however, Pahlavi was a “good” dictator.
His predecessor Mohammed Mossadegh, a democratically elected president, who they hounded out of office, was regarded as “very bad” because he defended the interests of his own country and tried to nationalize its oil. Saddam’s “good,” eight-year war against “evil” Iran was the deserved punishment for the misdeed of the insurgent Iranian clerics.
Even the use of chemical weapons, with their horrendous consequences, against Iran did not cross any “American red line” because Saddam was a “good” guy at the time. Unlike, say, Syria, with “evil” dictator Assad in charge, which was bombed by America because of chemical weapons use by someone else.
Unlike the Iranian theocrats, the Afghan Taliban were God’s Warriors for many years, doing good according to the name: Thanks to more than $2 billion in weapons, logistical support and training the CIA channeled to the mujahideen between 1979 and 1989, they defeated the “evil empire” (according to U.S. President Reagan), i.e., the Soviet Union (Russia from 1991), in Afghanistan.
The fact that in the process they also overthrew and murdered the Afghan president, who advocated a multi-party system and built schools for girls throughout the country, had not bothered governments and media figures in the West. After all, he was a “bad” guy because he did not turn down material support from the “evil empire.”
The tide turned for the formerly “good” Taliban after the 9/11 terrorist attack. Washington condemned them as irresponsible and evil, although they were not involved in the terrorist attack themselves and even offered the U.S. government extradition of those al-Qaeda terrorists who were in Afghanistan. The U.S. government and its Western aides did not accept the offer, preferring to carry out an undoubtedly “good” NATO invasion of Afghanistan, albeit one that violated international law, because of the Taliban, now perceived as entirely evil.
Even the formerly “good” dictator Saddam was amazed when his status metamorphose into “evil” dictator almost overnight—after he invaded Kuwait, with U.S. encouragement! Perhaps he overlooked the fact that his intention to sell oil in currencies other than the American monopoly currency was totally heinous. After the 9/11 terrorist attacks, American intelligence agencies accused him of running a secret program to develop weapons of mass destruction. The accusations turned out to be bare-faced lies, which America and its vassals (also called the “coalition of the willing”) used as a pretext to carry out a “good” invasion of Iraq, although illegal under international law, in order to get rid of a now evil dictator. […]
The post Everything You‘ve Always Wanted To Know About: ‘Good’ Wars, ‘Good’ War Criminals, ‘Good’ Dictators, ‘Good’ Separatists, ‘Good’ Oligarchs, ‘Good’ Money Launderers—And Their Antitheses!appeared first on CovertAction Magazine.