Today’s American Government is the post-9/11 U.S. Government, from George W. Bush on through to Joe Biden. Today’s Russian Government is the Russian Government since Vladimir Putin became Russia’s leader. During the Twentieth Century’s final day, 31 December 1999, Russia’s President Boris Yeltsin unexpectedly resigned and, according to the Constitution of Russia, Putin became Acting President of the Russian Federation.
The neocon (i.e., advocate for expanding the U.S. empire — NATO, etc.) Karen Dawisha, in her 2015 book Putin’s Kleptocracy(which has been widely praised by other neocon media), dropped her first hint that she had actually no evidence of it (no evidence of his being a kleptocrat), on the book’s page 125, in its chapter “Putin in St. Petersburg, 1990-1996,” where she referred to the constantly failing efforts of Putin’s many enemies to find proof that he is corrupt: “Despite what must have been a huge effort to find concrete evidence of Putin’s own bribe taking, there is none. Any cuts Putin took, any favors he received in return for favors he gave, were not documented, did not occur in Russia, or were ‘commissions’ for the Mayor’s Contingency Fund. If he is the owner or partial owner of any of these companies, they must be registered abroad, not in Russia. This Teflon ability to deflect criticism and to not give his critics an easy win with evidence of bribe-taking would stand him in good stead throughout his career.” Considering what is already publicly known about bribe-taking and “favors … received in return for favors he gave,” regarding Joe Biden, Clarence Thomas, Samuel Alito, and other American high public officials, this admission, by her, absolutely decimated her book’s very title (demonstrates that title to be fraudulent).
However, this same Karen Dawisha was the prime ‘expert’ whom America’s Propaganda Broadcasting Service (PBS) relied upon in their 1 March 2015 Frontline Series documentary, “Putin’s Way” (also known as “Vladimir Putin’s Rise To Power”). Like skillful propaganda usually is, many of its alleged facts are real, but the context in which they occurred is false.
ABOVE: There was a time when Frontline acquired journalistic prestige by tackling important topics with honesty and professionalism. But, almost a generation ago, the program was hijacked by the Deep State and turned into a shameless imperialist propaganda platform. Now, to any intelligent person, Frontline is an insult.
For example, the entire documentary ignores the crucial fact — and any detail regarding — that the U.S. Government, under Bill Clinton, sent into Russia, when Gorbachev ended the communist system there, the Harvard Economics Department, under the guidance of Larry Summers, which taught Yeltsin’s new Russian Government how to distribute state assets to favored individuals in such a way as to enable selected corrupt Americans to get their claws into the country’s economy, in the new, capitalistic, Russia. This created the enormous corruption that dogged the new capitalistic Russia. None of this crucial context is mentioned in that brainwashing documentary, which is designed instead so as to help to restore that secret U.S.-and-allied economic control over the new Russia which existed until Putin came into power there. One of the first things that Putin did when he took the reins of power on the first day of the new Millennium was to force the U.S.-made Russian billionaires to subordinate themselves to the new Russian Government or else become prosecuted by it — and he demanded that all of their absconded wealth, and their evaded taxes, be paid to Russia’s Government, or else they would be prosecuted. Furthermore, at 47:00- near the documentary’s end, it lies, in the standard U.S.-and-allied way, about the shoot-down on 17 July 2014 of the Malaysian MH17 passenger plane over the war-zone in the rebeling far eastern Ukraine — a shoot-down by Ukraine’s government, NOT by Russia’s (such as the Western lie alleges totally without — and entirely ignoring — the black-box and other solid evidence). Furthermore, the documentary falsely alleges that the main reason why Russia objected to what Ukraine’s government was doing was the recently U.S.-coup-installed Ukrainian government’s persecution of Russian-speakers in Ukraine, when the ACTUAL main reason was that Russia refused to allow U.S. nuclear missiles to become posted on the nearest foreign border to The Kremlin, just 300 miles away from blitz-nuking Russia’s central command. (In the 1962 Cuban Missile Crisis, JFK wouldn’t allow Soviet missiles to be located 1,131miles away from Washington DC.) So: that documentary was, in effect, a total lie, to boost the neocon agenda against Russia. And whereas America on 20 March 2003 invaded Iraq totally on the basis of lies, Russia on 24 February 2022 invaded Ukraine totally on the basis of truths.
Furthermore: trust in the Government is only 33% in America, whereas it is 44% in Russia. (In China — the highest — it is 84%, and that’s another country the U.S. regime wants to conquer.) And whereas the approval-rating for Joe Biden by Americans is 42%, the approval-rating for Vladimir Putin in Russia is 80%. (The March 2016 journal Post-Soviet Affairs had an article “Is Putin’s popularity real?” and reluctantly concluded that “our results suggest that the main obstacle at present to the emergence of a widespread opposition movement to Putin is not that Russians are afraid to voice their disapproval of Putin, but that Putin is in fact quite popular.” There is constant U.S.-and-‘allied’ propaganda against this reality, such as the Washington Post article that was published contemporaneously with that academic one and which headlined “How to understand Putin’s jaw-droppingly high approval ratings”. It closed by saying, “‘Switch off the television, and this popularity would go away in two months,’ said Mikhail Kasyanov, a former prime minister who is now a leading opposition politician.”)
So: people who support America’s Government against Russia’s Government think on the basis of the propaganda that they’ve been exposed to. The facts don’t support — but clearly contradict — the propaganda, on this matter.
PERSONAL NOTE: I write this not as an American, which I am and have always been, and not as a Russian, which I never have been, but as a scientist — and science is supposed to be the same throughout the world.
J. Matson Heininger
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