Dispatches from Deena Stryker
The same has been true with respect to Russia: under Soviet leadership, the US treated the biggest country on earth as an enemy. When the communist form of government was abandoned, and Yeltsin and his band of corrupt opportunists took the reins of power, the US treated Russia as a potential friend to be brought into the ‘Western’ fold. When Russia’s leadership changed — without changing its political system but simply becoming more independent than most nations are vis a vis the most powerful nation on the planet — we began treating Russia as an ‘adversary’.
Americans who believe countries should cooperate rather than engage in power plays find themselves compelled to side with Russia, because that is what the Russian leader consistently advocates and practices among his allies. However, they are warned that even sitting next to the president of a country viewed by Washington as an adversary casts doubt on their patriotism. Yesterday, the head of the FBI — which together with the CIA, is the US’s equivalent of Russia’s KGB (now FSB) — was asked by a tense member of the legislative branch whether sitting next to President Putin — as one of candidate Trump’s aide’s had done — was cause for an official investigation, especially since he must have received compensation in the thousands of dollars, as reported by Rachel Maddow. This insinuation is a slur on both the Russian President and the handful of Americans — such as, by the way, former Green candidate Jill Stein — who were invited to the tenth anniversary of ‘Putin’s Bullhorn’ known as RT, or Russia Today.
As the Democratic Party continues to lick the wounds inflicted on it by working Americans, the real ‘left’, such as it is, needs to move from protesting over bathroom access to demanding a sane foreign policy.
(Maddow also claimed that the Russian President — according to Fareed Zakaria’s latest documentary masterpiece, ‘the most powerful man in the world’ — isn’t interested in being part of the ‘free world’ — not because he is not interested in freedom, as Maddow claims, but precisely because he believes all countries should be free to follow their own path, while in US parlance, the ‘free world’ is one which obeys its dictates.)
Vladimir Putin’s worldview is ‘multi-polar’, which I define in a previous article.
The day after the five-hour long congressional committee deposition of FBI head James Comey and NSA Director Mike Rogers, Maddow devoted half her hour-long program to a detailed expose of Russian hacking, claiming it had been announced at a Russian event in March as a weapon that would force the US to treat it as an equal, and delving minutely into the role played by internet ‘bots’ in turning Bernie supporters away from Hillary. Clearly, Maddow doesn’t need a government script: she writes it. And yet, our dog-leashed press would never acknowledge that Kremlin-funded RT, which also broadcasts in Arabic and Spanish, provides a unique window onto the five continents — without advertising — or that it has been run since its inception by a woman, Margarita Simonyan, a Russian journalist of Armenian origin.
It probably wouldn’t matter to America’s hawks that President Putin launched an enterprise that competes with the BBC and CNN if RT hadn’t succeeded in increasing its viewership year after year: In 2011, it was the second most-watched foreign news channel in the United States after the BBC, and the number one foreign network in five major U.S. urban areas in 2012. (In 2015, RT was the winner of France’s Monte-Carlo TV Festival for Best 24-Hour Newscast, the only Russian TV channel with three International Emmy nominations for news coverage, and the #1 TV news network on YouTube, with nearly 3 billion views.)
Among the public figures invited to participate in RT’s tenth anniversary celebration, held in December, 2015 at the Moscow Metropol Hotel, were Ken Livingstone, a former mayor of London; Cyril Svoboda, former foreign affairs minister of the Czech Republic; Willy Wimmer, German statesman and ex-VP of the OSCE; Patricia Villegas, president of the pan-Latin American news network teleSUR; Lieutenant General Michael Flynn, former head of the US Defense Intelligence Agency, and CIA whistleblower Raymond McGovern. As part of a growing group of Americans and Europeans whose independent analyses coincide with those of the Russian President, they are often interviewed on RT — letting the world know that not all Americans are war-mongers.
The irony here is that during the entire period of the Cold War, the US State Department ran a program named after William Fulbright — the Senate’s illustrious internationalist — which brought foreign scholars, politicians and opinion-makers to the US for extended stays on the US government’s tab, so that they might observe ‘democracy in action’ and carry its methods back to their home countries. But let not Russia so much as invite prominent Americans to dinner!
With the country desperate over the new president’s unsavory initiatives and plans — such as ‘worse torture than water-boarding’ or a healthcare plan that would increase those without coverage, it is vital that whatever ‘doves’ (when was the last time we heard that word?) remain in Washington resist the threat of having their ‘activities’ — as in ‘House Un-American Activities Committee (HUAC) — with respect to Russia evaluated as part of the FBI’s investigation into Russia’s role in the US presidential election.
As the Democratic Party continues to lick the wounds inflicted on it by working Americans, the real ‘left’, such as it is, needs to move from protesting over bathroom access to demanding a sane foreign policy. Secretary Rex Tillerson deliberately echoed the Chinese worldview based on cooperation rather than conflict in his recent Beijing statement; and the appointment of Jon Huntsman as Ambassador to Moscow (after being the US envoy to Beijing in the first Obama administration), bodes well for the prospect of scaling down tensions with Russia. But the chances that this will be allowed to happen are slim, for such an erratic President as Donald Trump cannot be allowed to remain in office. Untypically prompt in investigating his claim that he was wire-tapped by the Obama administration, the system turned the tables on him, using the hearings to get on the record official confirmation that the investigation into Russia’s so-called interference in the US election — its ‘challenge to our democratic system’ — must include an investigation of whether Trump colluded with our ‘adversary’, in order to get rid of him once and for all by impeachment.
Congressional investigations continue a long-standing American tradition, known as witch-hunts. They bring us back, not only to the McCarthy era, but to the event it evoked: the seventeenth century Salem Witch Hunts, that resulted in the hanging of twenty New England women. Their modern incarnation, extending into citizens’ conversations with foreigners, does not place the US on a higher level of civilization than our ‘adversary’. Au contraire.
DEENA STRYKER, Senior Contributing Editor
Born in Philadelphia, Stryker spent most of her adolescent and adult years in Europe, resulting over time in several unique books, her latest being
CUBA: Diary of a Revolution, Inside the Cuban Revolution with Fidel, Raul, Che, and Celia Sanchez
America Revealed to a Honey-Colored World
A Taoist Politics: The Case For Sacredness
She began her journalistic career at the French News Agency in Rome, spent two years in Cuba finding out whether the Barbados were Communists before they made the revolution (‘Cuba 1964: When the Revolution was Young’). After spending half a decade in Eastern Europe, and a decade in the U.S., studying Global Survival and writing speeches in the Carter State Department, she wrote the only book that foresaw the fall of the Berlin Wall AND the dissolution of the Soviet Union (“Une autre Europe, un autre Monde’). Her memoir, ‘Lunch with Fellini, Dinner with Fidel’, tells it all. ‘A Taoist Politics: The Case for Sacredness’, which examines the similarities between ancient wisdom and modern science and what this implies for political activism; and ‘America Revealed to a Honey-Colored World” is a pamphlet about how the U.S. came down from the City on a Hill’.
MAIN IMAGE: FBI Director Comey. Lending his persona to political theater.
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