Ukraine? Russia? Keep Your Eyes on the Prize

Western journalist standing by pro-Russia activist in Slavyansk, Eastern Ukraine.

Western journalist standing by pro-Russia activist—properly attired for clashes with rightwing supporters of the new Kievan regime—in Slavyansk, Eastern Ukraine. Slavyansk and Donetsk are two cities where the separatist, pro-Russia movement sweeping the region is strongest.

Hello everyone. Very interesting, and gratifying to me, Paul Craig Roberts (who has been writing along these lines all along) has essentially endorsed the view that I put forward about a month ago, in a column published on The Greanville Post (https://www.greanvillepost.com/2014/03/31/ukraine-russia-keep-your-eyes-on-the-prize), with the US policy now enforced by Ukrainian force, not just sanctions (which the EU essentially refused to go along with). I feel that I am in good company.

All the best, Steve Jonas

SPECIAL DISPATCH
Steven Jonas, MD, MPH
Senior Contributing Editor

It is always the economic ruling class that controls the state apparatus, the government, in one way or another. This is unless the government has become so violent that it can maintain itself in place by the use of force, massed and personal, against even the most highly placed, in both the ruling class and the military, as was the case in capitalist Nazi Germany…”

In a previous column on this subject, I reviewed briefly the history (that is the full picture, not just the half that is presented in the US media) of what has been going on in Ukraine and the Russian response to it. I considered what in my view is the main strategic reason for that response, the determination of Russia to maintain control of its principal warm water port, at Sevastopol, Crimea. All the rest from the Russian point of view, in my view, is commentary. (The previous column is well-referenced, and additional references appear in a subsequent version of it published elsewhere. For further references, see also two excellent columns on the subject by my friend, colleague, and editor at BuzzFlash, Mark Karlin.)

As is now well-known, President Obama has gone all-in on this one, with very strong accusations against Russia, and President Putin in particular, of all kinds of violations of international law and human rights and a drive for “expansion” (ho, ho, ho — with what, against whom?). This takes place in the context of, over the past few months in the U.S/. Media, a ramping up of a personal demonization of Mr. Putin, in part trying to make his actions into matters of personal psychology and pique.

Obama has issued some economic sanctions, fairly limited so far, and has invited the EU countries to come all-in with him in issuing much stronger ones. Currently the feeling in the media is that they will not go too far along the lines of what Obama is asking for. This is because, as is well-known, the economies of many members are tied, to a greater or lesser extent, to the importation of energy supplies and the export of manufactured products, like luxury automobiles for the oligarchs and their dependents (Germany in particular) to Russia. He is also, for show, sending some extra fighter jets and the like in military hardware to neighboring countries of Russia.

Now President Putin has said that he has no plans to invade any other NATO members, and he would be highly foolish to do so. NATO was designed specifically as an anti-Soviet military alliance as the US was ramping up the Cold War in 1949, once the Soviet Union “got the bomb.” Since the demise of the Soviet Union, it has been an anti-Russia alliance. It provides that an attack on any member is to be considered an attack on all. Interestingly enough, the agreement made between the Western Powers and the last Soviet Government just before its demise (as well as with the successor counter-revolutionary government of Boris Yeltsin), that the latter would withdraw its 300,000 troops from East Germany, thus permitting the merger of the East and West Germany, was contingent upon the pledge from NATO not to expand to Soviet borders. That agreement has been violated by the West to the extent that virtually every country bordering on now Russia is member of NATO, except for Ukraine.

In my view now, the coup that toppled the elected (although totally incompetent and corrupt) previous Ukrainian Government, putting in place a pro-Western government with openly fascist elements in it, had little to with either the EU or NATO, as it is commonly thought to be. Nor do I now think, as I did in my earlier column referenced below, given Obama’s speeches and more importantly his actions, that he has been an innocent bystander in all of this, being pushed along by middle-level State Neo-cons and National Endowment for Democracy officials, being forced to catch up. I now rather think that the whole thing has been a set-up for Putin, led by the White House. A trap was set for him and, at the cost of the Sevastopol base and to a lesser extent his popularity inside Russia, he could not avoid stepping right into it.

Based on his actions and the incredible hypocrisy of this speeches, it cannot now be doubted that Obama is not only with the unreconstructed Neo-cons, he is moving to position himself to be their leader, McCain et al to the contrary notwithstanding. Now that the U.S.-specific sanctioning has begun, against what or rather who is the process aimed? So far, individuals, certain members of the Russian “Oligarchy” and certain closely associated “Oligarchy” member institutions.

The conventional wisdom is that Putin controls the Oligarchy that collectively embodies the top-end of the economic Russian ruling class. Well, that can be the case only if Russia is completely different from any other country on Earth. It is always the economic ruling class that controls the state apparatus, the government, in one way or another. This is unless the government has become so violent that it can maintain itself in place by the use of force, massed and personal, against even the most highly placed, in both the ruling class and the military, as was the case in capitalist Nazi Germany.

The prize here is not Ukraine, and it is not getting NATO even further around European Russia. (What? 80% or so isn’t enough?) No. The prize is Russia, for Global Capitalism. Russia has enormous energy reserves, many of them unexplored. (It just so happens that, for example, Exxon is already there.) Russia has an enormous potential market for consumer goods, and an enormous potential supply of cheap labor for Western manufacturers. Russia is not a socialist state (although it is likely that most US don’t know the difference between Russia and the Soviet Union, which was at least nominally socialist.) Russia is a capitalist country, run by a group of 19^th-century-type Robber Baron capitalists. Aided by the West’s hand-picked Boris Yeltsin, they were in positions to steal the means of production from the nation as a whole when the Soviet Union broke up.

Putin presently keeps certain of the Oligarchs in check. But Putin, who has dreams of restoring “Russian Glory,” seemingly part-Czarist, part-Soviet, is an inconvenient impediment to the expansion of Global Capitalism into Russia itself. Do you think that the Oligarchs, just like our capitalist top-guns, really care who is in charge, just as long as they get their way and make their profits? And suppose a system came in that promises them an even larger share of the pie, without the present total unpredictability of a national leader who every once in a while on a whim throws one of them in prison?

There is a deal to be made here, especially if certain individual oligarchs and their enterprises can be made to feel the pain, now. There is also a pro-Western Chief Executive waiting in the wings to follow along the lines briefly outlined above, once Putin is disposed of (in one way or another). And that would be the former President and present Prime Minister, Dmitry Medvedev (who would then become the Boris Yeltsin of the incorporation of Russia into Global Capitalism). Obama is going to continue to ramp up that kind of pressure, which he can do without asking the EU to do much else.

The prize is not Ukraine in the EU and NATO. The prize is the Russian economy, fully integrated into Global Capitalism. And next for the voracious appetite of that institution, if it can get there before it destroys the world with uncontrolled global warming, is of course, China. Stay tuned.

_____________________

About the Author
Senior Editor Steven Jonas, MD, MPH is a Professor of Preventive Medicine at Stony Brook University (NY) and author/co-author/editor/co-editor of over 30 books. In addition to being a columnist for The Greanville Post, he also serves in the same capacity at BuzzFlash/Truthout (http://www.buzzflash.com,http://www.truth-out.org/), and he is the Managing Editor of and a Contributing Author to TPJmagazine.net.

In his academic career Dr. Jonas has received numerous honors and awards. Among other things, he is a Fellow of the New York Academy of Sciences (elected), the American College of Preventive Medicine, the American Public Health Association, the New York Academy of Medicine, and the Royal Society of Medicine (UK) . He is a Past President of the Association of Teachers of Preventive Medicine, and a past member of the New York State Board for Medicine. He is Editor-in-Chief of theAmerican Medical Athletic Association Journal.

Washington’s drive for regime change in Venezuela

Bill Van Auken

In the past few days, US officials have resumed a drumbeat of denunciations against the Venezuelan government of President Nicolás Maduro.

In response to an appeal from a right-wing Venezuelan émigré in Miami, President Barack Obama described himself as “deeply troubled by the continued repression of protestors in Venezuela,” and declared that he was “working behind the scenes” to influence events in the South American country.

Speaking Monday via an Internet video connection to a conference in Estonia of the “Freedom Online Coalition,” which includes the governments of 23 countries, Secretary of State John Kerry made unsubstantiated claims that the Venezuelan government had blocked access to some web sites and lumped it together with Russia as a country that suppresses Internet freedom and constitutes a place “where we face some of the greatest security challenges today.”

Needless to say, the US secretary of state—who had earlier condemned the Venezuelan government for waging a “terror campaign” against its own people—made no mention of Washington’s own role in the wholesale spying on Internet activities of hundreds of millions of people around the globe.

And at a separate conference in New York City, Roberta Jacobsen, the undersecretary of state for Western Hemisphere affairs, told an audience that the Obama administration was not “ruling out anything,” including the imposition of sanctions against Venezuela, but for now advocated “giving a chance” to the ongoing “dialogue” between the Maduro government and its right-wing opposition.

The statements by the US president and the two top State Department officials only go to confirm the warning made last month by Maduro that his government is confronting a “slow-motion” coup, in which US-backed violent demonstrators are “copying badly what happened in Kiev.”

In Venezuela, as in Ukraine, the aim of US imperialism is to remove any obstacle to its exercise of hegemony. Venezuela sits atop the world’s largest proven oil reserves, and Washington is determined to place these strategic resources firmly under its thumb. The Venezuelan government’s diversion of oil revenues to finance minimal assistance programs for the poor, its provision of subsidized oil exports to Cuba and other nations in what the US has always regarded as its “own backyard,” and the growing trade and financial ties between Caracas and Beijing have all served to provoke the ire of the US government.

As in Kiev, in Venezuela Washington backed “peaceful protesters” who dubbed their campaign la salida (the exit), meaning the ouster of the elected president. To that end they employed Molotov cocktail attacks against government buildings and sniper fire against security forces and government supporters. All the while, as in Ukraine, Washington and the Western media grossly exaggerated the repressive actions of the government, while utterly ignoring the violence of the demonstrators.

Unlike Kiev, la salida failed to achieve its objective. The violent protests were confined almost exclusively to the more well-heeled neighborhoods. They attracted little to no support within the country’s working class and impoverished masses. Their own growing anger against rising prices and chronic shortages notwithstanding, working people recognize in the protest leaders—who, like their counterparts in Kiev are longtime recipients of US aid through agencies such as USAID and the National Endowment for Democracy—the representatives of imperialism and the old Venezuelan oligarchy that oppressed the country for centuries.

Now, along with Washington, the Venezuelan right and big business are “giving a chance” to the so-called “dialogue” initiated by the Maduro government, even as the violent protests continue, albeit on a far reduced level.

Mediated by the Vatican and foreign ministers of Brazil, Colombia and Ecuador, this dialogue has been aimed at reaching an accommodation between the Maduro government and the right-wing opposition, organized in the electoral coalition known as MUD (Democratic Unity Roundtable). Alongside these dialogue sessions, the government has organized an economic “peace conference” with leading Venezuelan capitalists, appealing for an increase in production and asking billionaires like Lorenzo Mendoza of the Polar food conglomerate what they need to boost productivity and profits.

What the Venezuelan financial and corporate ruling layers are demanding is more cash from the public treasury—which they are being granted—as well as higher prices on goods along with attacks on basic rights and living standards of the working class. These are also forthcoming, with prices on a number of basic commodities having been quietly allowed to increase—along with a 40 percent hike in public transit fares—and labor laws protecting workers against layoffs increasingly ignored.

Maduro used May Day to announce a 30 percent increase in the minimum wage, upon which large sections of those employed in the formal sector subsist. Given an inflation rate that neared 60 percent last year, the increase leaves workers far behind, with two minimum wage salaries required just to buy basic necessities under even the government’s low estimate of these costs.

The president of Venezuela’s chamber of commerce, Fedecamaras, Jorge Roig, praised Maduro for consulting with big business before announcing the paltry wage hike, calling the 30 percent rise “responsible.”

The emerging strategy of the Venezuelan right and its US sponsors is to utilize the instability it has created to push the government to the right, while in the process further alienating the measure of popular support it enjoyed thanks to its social assistance programs and populist rhetoric.

Waiting in the wings, should neither the Maduro government nor the right prove capable of imposing new conditions of stability for Venezuelan capitalism, is the military. From the coming to power nearly 15 years ago of Hugo Chávez, a former army lieutenant colonel and abortive coup leader, the military has played a decisive role in the “Bolivarian Socialist” government. Today military officers occupy 11 government ministries, including the most important—Defense, Interior and Economy—as well as the majority of the country’s governorships. The announcement that three air force generals and some 30 officers have been arrested for alleged participation in a coup plot serves as a deadly warning.

The Venezuelan working class is confronted with sharp dangers, not only from the political right, but from within the Maduro government and its military core as well.

Those pseudo-left elements who have cast “Chavismo” and “Bolivarian Socialism” as some new road to socialism have worked to politically disarm workers in the face of these threats. They have painted in rosy colors a situation in which the grip of private capital over the country’s economy is greater than before Chávez took office and in which finance capital is reaping super profits off of Venezuelan oil revenues, even as a new layer tied to the government, the so-called boliburguesia, enriches itself through contracts and corruption.

Venezuelan groups like Marea Socialista (MS-Socialist Tide), whose politics are promoted by both the Pabloites and the International Socialist Organization, pose the task of the working class as pressuring Maduro to the left to counteract the pressure from the right. Other pseudo-left groups abroad have moved even further to the right, distancing themselves from the Venezuelan government after Chávez opposed the imperialist regime change operations in Libya and Syria that these groups have supported.

In the end, all of these groups speak politically for more privileged layers of the petty bourgeoisie. They were attracted to Chavismo precisely because it subordinated the working class to a “comandante” and a military-dominated government, thereby mediating Venezuela’s explosive class struggle.

The bitter lessons of the recent violent clashes in Venezuela and the government’s response are summed up in the necessity of establishing the political independence of the working class, in opposition to the bourgeois government of Maduro and its pseudo-left supporters. This means building a section of the International Committee of the Fourth International based on the theory of permanent revolution and fighting for the working class to take power in Venezuela and throughout Latin America.

Bill Van Auken is a senior political commentator with wsws.org.

The Story of Venezuela’s Protests

Much Different From What You’ve Heard

Antigovernment Venezuelans protest in London. Typical of the upper-class background of this insurgency supported by US agents. Notice the well-made signs.

By Mark Weisbrot

_In reacting to the protests in Venezuela, the biggest Western media outlets have drafted a charmingly simple narrative of the situation there. According to this story, peaceful protesters have risen up against a government because of shortages, high inflation, and crime. They have taken to the streets and been met with brutal repression from a government that also controls the media.

It doesn’t take much digging to take down this narrative. First, while there have been some peaceful opposition marches, the daily protests are anything but peaceful. In fact, about half of the daily death toll from Venezuela that we see in the media – now at 41 — are actually civilians and security forces apparently killed by protesters. A much smaller fraction are protesters alleged to have been killed by security forces. As for the media, state TV in Venezuela has only about 10 percent of the TV audience; the New York Times recently had to run a correction for falsely reporting that opposition voices are not regularly heard on Venezuelan TV. They are on TV, even calling for the overthrow of the government – which has been the announced goal of the protest leaders from the beginning. These are not like the protests last year in Brazil, or the student protests from 2011-13 in Chile, which were organized around specific demands.

Of course the increased shortages and rising inflation over the past year have had a political impact on Venezuela, but it is striking that the people who are most hurt by shortages are decidedly not joining the protests. Instead, the protests are joined andled by the upper classes, who are least affected.

In fact, the protests really got going largely as a result of a split within the Venezuelan opposition. Henrique Capriles, who lost to Chávez and then Maduro in the last two presidential elections, was considered too conciliatory by the more extreme right, led by Leopoldo López and María Corina Machado. They decided that the time was ripe to topple the government through street protests. Both were involved in the 2002 military coup against then President Chávez; María Corina Machado evensigned the decree of the coup government that abolished the elected National Assembly (AN), the Constitution, and the Supreme Court.

Don’t get me wrong: I am not defending the jailing of López or the Venezuelan AN decision to expel Machado, just as I would not defend the French government’sprosecution of far-right politicians for Holocaust denial, or the proposed banning of the fascist Golden Dawn party in Greece. But we should be honest about who these Venezuelan opposition leaders are and what they are trying to do.

The strategy of Venezuela’s extreme right is to make the country ungovernable, so as to gain by force what they have been unable to win in 18 elections over the past 15 years. It is clear from the statements of Brazil’s former president Lula da Silva and current president Dilma Rousseff that they have no illusions about what is going on in Venezuela. It is now 50 years since Brazil’s coup brought in the military dictatorship that put them in prison, but they can remember what a coup looks like. So, too, can the other governments of South America, who have made similar statements. But they have also offered to mediate between the government and any opposition leaders who are willing to participate in a dialogue. This process looks encouraging so far. Let’s hope so; that is the only way forward in Venezuela.

Mark Weisbrot is Co-Director of the Center for Economic and Policy Research and co-writer of Oliver Stone’s documentary “South of the Border.” He is also President of Just Foreign Policy (www.justforeignpolicy.org).

The simple truth behind the Eastern Ukraine uprisings

Why Rebellion Is Spreading In Ukraine

29.Apr.2014 |

An SCG dispatch

_This past week in Eastern Ukraine there have been new government buildings seized, there have been hostages taken, assassinations, assassination attempts and riots in the streets, but unless you were paying very close attention to the back story (the part of the story that the mainstream media avoids completely), you might be wondering how the situation unraveled so fast.

The fact that the provisional government in Kiev attempted twice this month to use the Ukrainian military to crush the separatist uprising in the East, is a big deal. The fact that they failed twice is an even bigger deal. Based on the headlines coming from the New York Times and U.S.A. Today, you might assume that these events never happened, and you would certainly never come away with the understanding that the chaos we are seeing right now is a direct result of these blunders.

All attention is on Russia. Russia did this, Russia did that, Russia might do such and such… The idea that Kiev brought any of this on themselves, is never entertained even for a moment by any of the major talking heads on the left or the right.

All attention is placed on Russian troops on the Ukrainian border, and mass invasions that some source in the provisional government keeps claiming are imminent (but never seem to materialize), while these so called journalists conveniently ignore the elephant in the room here: The provisional government in Kiev has no aura of authority. They aren’t respected by the civilians, and more importantly they aren’t respected by the Ukrainian military. The simple fact of the matter is that the Ukrainian military is more than capable of clearing out the occupied towns if they really wanted to, but they don’t want to. Their actions prove this.

Can you blame them? What would you do if you were receiving morally questionable orders from men who took power in a coup with direct assistance from the United States government?

And another thing. Stop calling the separatists “pro-Russian”. If you listen to their statements the actual sentiment of the protesters is primarily anti-Kiev. They don’t trust the provisional government. Leaning towards Russia is just the default reaction in the absence of convincing leadership.

Russia is certainly an important variable in this equation, but nothing makes up for a lack of perceived authority. Yes, Russia threatened to intervene if Kiev used the military against the protesters. That was significant, and it’s very possible that this warning influenced the outcome, but consider for a moment what that means. Without the use of overt force Kiev is completely incapable of controlling the situation. The figureheads at the top of Maidan have become (or perhaps always were) the very thing they condemned when they were protesting in Kiev just a few months ago.

Keyboard commandos can battle this out on the internet all they want, but Eastern Ukrainians view the provisional government in Kiev as subordinate to Washington. Unless that changes, stability is a pipe dream.

SOURCE: SCG News

Psycho-Cartoon Warfare: Putin as Hitler

By Dr. T P Wilkinson

_The real Hitler was rather popular in upper class western circles, at least until the start of World War Two. The media’s use of “Hitler” as a pejorative has little to do with the actual politics of the world’s most famous fascist. The Hitlerization of Putin turns reality on its head, “making the actual aggressor appear to be a victim by accusing one’s target of all the acts actually perpetrated by oneself.”

“The image that is to be created and maintained in the popular imagination is that Russia is invading Europe.”

There would appear to be something grotesque in the inflationary use of the term “Hitler” to attack any national leader opposed by the US regime and its vassals. What does the word “Hitler” actually mean – if anyone can be compared to Hitler, except actual fascists.

Before the outbreak of World War II, there had been very little mainstream negative reporting about the National Socialist German Workers Party (NSDAP, or Nazi) regime although Adolph Hitler had been in power since 1932. In fact the German head of government and state enjoyed positive support, especially among the corporate elite in the US and UK. The massive public works programs initiated under the NSDAP were even praised by liberals as an indication of what could be done to remedy general economic problems in the midst of a global depression.

The only serious objections to Hitler came from two sectors: the Left, which enjoyed no official sympathy, and the imperial business sectors (mainly in Britain) that were opposed to sharing any of their global wealth-streams with Germany. Of course the latter were thrilled that the NSDAP regime was increasing the profitability of investment in Germany and destroying the labor organizations of Europe’s largest workforce. The only influential critics of Hitler before 1939 were the hardline Germanophobes in the US, UK and France. Hitler, himself, did not become an acceptable enemy until it appeared that he had made a deal with Stalin in 1939 to divide Poland. In the US, Hitler only became an acceptable enemy once the Anglophile sector of the US elite prevailed over the nativist-nationalist faction which opposed any intervention in Europe. However, the US war against Hitler only really began after war had been declared on Japan and Hitler in turn declared war on the US at the end of 1941.

Until it became clear that the Soviet Union was defeating the German Wehrmacht, by 1942, the US had concentrated almost all of its efforts in the Pacific theater, waging war against its imperial rival in Asia. The prospect of Soviet victory over Germany induced the US regime to devote more attention to Europe. However, this came only after protracted campaigns in Africa and Italy. British belligerence toward the Germans had been entrenched since the Great War but anti-Hitler propaganda only became important once France had fallen and German Luftwaffe attacks against the British Isles commenced.

“Salazar and Franco as well as Pinochet were all fascists and they were never called “Hitlers” by the press.”

In short, the history of anti-Hitlerism and the image of Hitler as the equivalent of evil did not attain its current universality in the West during the WWII. With the possible exception of Chaplin’sThe Great Dictator (1940), there was probably no conspicuous mass media image of Hitler in any way consistent with today’s stereotype. Moreover, in Anglo-American mass media, the name Mussolini is almost never used. Although Franco and Salazar remained European dictators from the 1930s until the 1970s without interruption, neither name has any status in the mass media cliché world.

It is tempting to assert that it was the NSDAP regime’s concentration camp system and brutal warfare in Eastern Europe that gave rise to the Hitler stereotype. However, as Norman Finkelstein showed, this version of Nazism had been largely irrelevant outside of Germany and Eastern Europe for most of the post-war period. It only attaining polemical stature in the wake of the so-called Six-Day-War when massive efforts began to justify, mainly in the US, the realignment of the Middle East under Israeli hegemony. The modern “Hitler” stereotype actually has little in common with the historic Hitler or the prevailing relationships with Hitler and the NSDAP during the regime’s control of Germany.

The inflationary use of the term “Hitler” for any political personality to be vilified in the mass media is conspicuously distinct from the use of the term fascist. Another reason for this bizarre phenomenon is the impact of a strong biographical school which treats the NSDAP regime under Adolph Hitler as determined entirely by the personality of Hitler, the man. This school of thought persists in national security “profiling” of political leaders, e.g. as practiced by offices within the US intelligence agencies. The official assessment of any political personality is presented to the media in the form of a psychological “celebrity biography.” This supports an entrenched use of “celebrity” reporting to shape what the public views as information or news. “Hitler” is a term for “negative celebrity”: a person who is unavoidable in the news (or is made to seem unavoidable) but for only negative reasons. Orwell described this phenomenon when he illustrated the function of Goldstein in 1984. Hence it was possible to call Manuel Noriega “Hitler”, Saddam Hussein “Hitler” and now Putin, too.

Do Noriega, Hussein and Putin have any personal attributes in common? There are certainly none which would immediately suggest a relationship to the historical Adolph Hitler. They were not called Nazis or fascists? Perhaps because to be a Nazi or a fascist in the Anglo-American dominated mass media is not necessarily a bad thing. Salazar and Franco as well as Pinochet were all fascists and they were never called “Hitlers” by the Press. Perhaps fascist and national socialist are terms too complex to be used in celebrity reporting – the dominant form of so-called news dissemination.

Germany today presents a rather bizarre situation. Here we have been told for decades who Hitler was and what we were or are in relation to the era of the NSDAP regime. There is an old joke here about how the Austrians (especially through the Esterhazy family) appropriated Beethoven and Germans got Hitler from Austria in exchange. There are still people alive her who can remember the Nazi era. Until Willy Brandt became chancellor the federal government was headed mainly by people the US regime felt were at least good Nazis – the main thing being that they were not communists or social democrats. It was relatively easy to find people in high office, the academy and mass media who had been Nazis. But there was very clearly no Hitler. Even to compare the chairman of the SED (Socialist Unity Party) in East Germany to Hitler would have been viewed as tasteless and inappropriate.

“’Hitler’ is a term for ‘negative celebrity’: a person who is unavoidable in the news (or is made to seem unavoidable) but for only negative reasons.”

It is also a matter of record here that the extreme right/ neo-Nazi parties are so heavily infiltrated by undercover police and national security officers that jokes are made whether they would continue to exist without police membership. In short we have no Hitler candidates either in Germany or in Austria to attack.

So why now does the Hitler label penetrate the informal mass media here in Germany? Why is it almost compulsory to be opposed to Putin? There are two complementary reasons for this trend. One is because the US mass media, both conventional and internet-based, has an enormous rate of penetration in Germany, enhanced through the saturation of smart phones and tablets which bombard consumers here almost non-stop. The tendency to sympathize with the consumer-identity message that dominates US mass media creates a logical and emotional antipathy toward Putin’s Russia which is made to appear as intolerant as that shown some fantastic Islamic states (of course not compared with Saudi Arabia, only with Iran). Young people have learned to define their “freedom” in terms of direct and vicarious consumption – largely through fashion and internet products. Consumption is driven by “identity” politics. That is to say in the increasingly retarded process of human maturation, the creation, maintenance or remodeling of identity – normally an adolescent process – becomes permanent and product-driven.

Already by the late 1960s corporations had realized that by changing individualism into egotism the same energy that was threatening to vandalize the established social order could be turned into consumption. Youth were encouraged to become what they buy, which easily became buying in order to become. For instance the disappearance of gender-distinct clothing did not in itself cause a dissolution of gender distinctions but it did add to the market potential for clothing and other products which could be called transgender. The impact of such changes was superficial until the 1980s. In the 1980s a major shift in US corporate strategy occurred. The Thatcher and Reagan “revolutions” were successful because corporations had finally found the means to promote mass economic egotism. This involved two political shifts: an end to permanent corporate employment and the subordination of the race and class struggles that had been boiling since the 1950s to individual identity politics.

Although the Reagan regime was frequently attacked for its apparent pandering to the Religious Right, this actually kept most political opposition to Reagan focused on identity politics rather than on class or race issues, not to mention imperial warfare. The issue was not whether African-Americans have rights but who is actually African-American and what constitutes the essence of that identity to be protected. By abolishing for all intents and purposes permanent corporate employment as inherited from the New Deal, the foundation of the labor union structures were fundamentally undermined. No promise of job security meant that the prevailing union structures became useless. Add to this the identity political component and it was not difficult to persuade young people that a union was just another kind of meaningless conformity like a big monolithic corporation and that real individuality could only be found in one’s own unique employment relationship. Unique employment, unique consumption and unique identity configurations merged into what has really become an externalization of the human identity, programmed at corporate level and delivered individually by the latest version of hand-held electronic device.

“Youth were encouraged to become what they buy, which easily became buying in order to become.”

This process has also reconstructed the definition of “freedom” as something solely individual and personal. Correspondingly a “threat to freedom” need not take the form of military or police operations at all. A threat to freedom can be triggered by disconnection from the external identity production machine and its components: pop music, clothing, food, and synthetic messaging. In the USA to be black or brown, despite the skin color found among a miniscule number of the US elite, is to belong to the class of people who earn less, live shorter lives, and with the highest proportion of relatives in prison or subject to penal surveillance. This does not apply to homosexuals. Homosexuals do not constitute a class or a race in the US or anywhere else for that matter. However they do constitute a significant consumer group and include prestigious “market-makers” in the identity industry.

Hence when Vladimir Putin is presented as responsible for legislation or government policy that supposedly discriminates against homosexuals, Putin is attacking “identity product” and the consumers at the end of the hand-held devices are addicted to “identity product” much of which is sexuality based. Each consumer is induced to see the alleged acts of Putin in a way not unlike the reaction by a child of a parent or teacher who deprives the child of his electronic toys. The intensity of these reactions among youth has to be experienced to be believed. That is one of the means by which pseudo-dissent is cultivated, the kind of dissent that the owners of Twitter and Facebook have developed and marketed for the US corporate elite.

Describing Putin as Hitler in these terms feeds on the one hand on the relatively recent popularization of the narrative that homosexuals were persecuted under the NSDAP. However, the Hitler cliché among young people in Germany is less historically rooted than the general cliché that Hitler was the dictator par excellence.

However, for the older generations use of the Hitler cliché is actually rooted in a more insidious psy-war tactic. As the German government alternates between threats of economic and military action against Russia – while leading sectors of German industry know that they depend on Russian energy resources – an acute reversal is performed. The fact is that Hitler invaded the Soviet Union (Russia) with German troops, augmented by troops recruited from the occupied Eastern European countries. The ruler of the Soviet Union at the time, defending Russia was Stalin. Stalin defeated Hitler, forcing German forces to retreat to the River Elbe in Eastern Germany. Nearly seventy years later the German government with its troops deployed in numerous neo-colonial wars has been the dominant economic force in Eastern Europe since 1989. It has steadily pushed all its major manufacturing into the former COMECON countries. At the same time Russia lost virtually all its industrial trading partners as the dollar, deutschmark and finally the euro destroyed the payment system between Russia and its former trading and defense block. Meanwhile, German corporations control much if not most of the Baltic, Polish, Czech, Slovak and Rumanian economies. The Ukraine was a principal target for the expansion of the Hitler regime.

“Supposedly, Europe is defending itself from Russian aggression in 2014 the way the Soviet Union defended itself in 1940.”

Russia’s actions – or, better said, reactions – have been to maintain cordial business relations and to rely upon those in major German corporations with important trading links to Russia to moderate the extreme, largely pro-US, faction that aims to isolate Russia entirely. The US still enjoys substantial support in Germany, in part because of the interlocking economic, political and cultural institutions that work overtime to maintain a pro-American environment. The US and UK, going back to the Rapello Treaty in 1922, have always tried to obstruct economic cooperation between Germany and Russia.

The largely pro-American German mass media portrays Putin as Hitler because they cannot portray him as Stalin. The image that is to be created and maintained in the popular imagination is that Russia is invading Europe. In fact Germany has seized directly and indirectly nearly every economic asset that Hitler sought to hold before attacking the Soviet Union. Calling Putin Stalin under such conditions actually would recall that Stalin defended the Soviet Union against German invasion. By calling Putin Hitler, the image of a dictatorial leader of Russia “annexing” Eastern Europe piece by piece seems more emotionally plausible. Supposedly, Europe is defending itself from Russian aggression in 2014 the way the Soviet Union defended itself in 1940 (from whom?). No one can call Putin a communist or claim that there is a communist threat to be resisted in Eastern Europe. The governments in Berlin and Washington know that very well. One cannot accuse the Russians of Islamic terrorism, since everyone now knows that the Islamic terrorists are all in the pay of the US and Saudi Arabia.

The media strategy is an American one. It is based on making the actual aggressor appear to be a victim by accusing one’s target of all the acts actually perpetrated by oneself. The status of “victim” is an elemental fiction in US media manipulation and psychological warfare. The population of Germany, a country whose controlling heights and mass culture are probably more Americanized than any other in the non-English-speaking world, is being told every day how they are potential victims of Russian power and that Putin is threatening all their cherished identity products. The Hitler cliché augments this narrative also because the absolute dictator makes everyone an absolute victim.

Dr. T P Wilkinson writes, teaches History and English, directs theater and coaches cricket in Heinrich Heine’s birthplace, Düsseldorf. He is also the author of Church Clothes, Land, Mission and the End of Apartheid in South Africa (Maisonneuve Press, 2003).

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