The Russian government appears to be moving resolutely away from the radical reform program that was designed to transform the country from a Communist command economy to a free market system.
John Gray, Toronto Globe and Mail, 20 Dec 93
Category: WAR ON RUSSIA
Making Russia into an Enemy
Note February 2016. I wrote this in June 2012 as a suggestion to a website on what to do to counter the endless anti-Russia propaganda. In many ways, it summarises the theme of everything I have written since the early 1990s: the end of the Cold War gave us an opportunity to integrate Russia and the other USSR successor states into the winners’ circle. We failed to do that and, thereby, have set up the conditions for what we see today. And, there was no reason to do it. Moscow is now trying to counter the propaganda as I wished it would then; with some success, given the hysteria in the West about its loss of narrative control.
My concern is that, as a result of a mixture of reflexive hostility, sloth, lazy re-typing of memes and the campaigns of vengeful people we, the “West”, are gradually turning Russia into an enemy. And there is absolutely no reason for this: Russia needs a quiet life so that it can repair the ravages of 70 years of communism. In short, this behaviour is weakening our security: Russia is not and never will be a negligible power; we gain nothing and lose much by making it into an enemy.
In 1814, after 20 years of war, the settlement was made by the 5 “Great Powers” – Britain, Russia, Austria, Prussia and… France. France was included because it was understood that Revolutionary and Napoleonic France was not the only possible France; that France was not about to disappear from the map; that it was better to bring it into the winners’ circle than freeze it out. In 1945 the Western Allies incorporated the losers (Germany west and Japan – and Italy, which had switched sides just in time) into the winners’ circle. We do not seriously worry about a 4th Reich or 2nd East Asian Co-Prosperity Sphere today.
But the 1919 settlement punished Germany and tried to keep it down forever. The combination of harsh restrictions and feeble enforcement contributed to a second worse war.
The lesson of these two successful post-war settlements and the disastrous failure of the third seems obvious: incorporate the losers into the winners.
When the Cold War ended, the “West” did not follow either the 1814 or the 1945 examples. The “original sin” was the expansion of NATO in a manner that made it obvious that anyone could join. Except Russia. A door was slammed in Russia’s face. At the time George Kennan, the famous Mr X of 1946, warned us of the consequences of this “light-hearted” decision. We see the fruits today. My fear is now, and has been from the start, that we are repeating the disaster of 1919 and not the wisdom of 1814 or 1945.
I am afraid that I have no bright ideas about overcoming the biased, incompetent, hostile and often knowingly false coverage of Russia in the Western MSM. On the bright side, the Old Media is dying and had already lost much of its power to define what constitutes “The News”. But the New Media is still weak and, in any case, will never have the near-monopoly of “News” that the Old Media had.
So, given the terrible state of coverage of Russia in the West, we have to ask the traditional questions: Кто виноват? and Что делать?
Who’s guilty? Well there are those for whom Russia is and always will be the Eternal Enemy. And there are those who have a personal interest in denigrating Russia. There’s nothing that we can do to change their minds: we cannot reason them out of ideas they were not reasoned into. These people will die off eventually. As to the others, the imitators, the lazy, perhaps we can.
What to do? All I can suggest is to keep chewing away at the memes – but it always takes more effort to defeat a meme than it does to re-type it. It’s like Hercules and the Hydra: as soon as you destroy one, another two are created.
One suggestion is to create a website – a sort of reference library – with pieces that counter some of the memes. (Although many of them cannot be countered by mere facts). I expect no great effect from this but it would at least make our jobs easier if we had a single source to point to.
Finally: I do wish Moscow would put more effort into countering this. I sometimes think that Russians are too proud to engage in PR. But they should.
US and Russia Under Obama
There are aspirations and then there are policies. I think we really can’t talk in terms of a unitary policy being made by a government as headed by Obama. I do not see Barack Obama as being in control. I see him buffeted about, very inexperienced, advised by similarly inexperienced advisers on foreign policy, people who really don’t know which end is up when it comes to Russia. And I see on the other side what we call the neocons. Those are the people who hate Russia.
Ray McGovern, February 2016
George Kennan on NATO Expansion
I think it is the beginning of a new cold war,” said Mr. Kennan from his Princeton home. ”I think the Russians will gradually react quite adversely and it will affect their policies. I think it is a tragic mistake. There was no reason for this whatsoever. No one was threatening anybody else. This expansion would make the Founding Fathers of this country turn over in their graves. We have signed up to protect a whole series of countries, even though we have neither the resources nor the intention to do so in any serious way. [NATO expansion] was simply a light-hearted action by a Senate that has no real interest in foreign affairs.”
”What bothers me is how superficial and ill informed the whole Senate debate was,” added Mr. Kennan, who was present at the creation of NATO and whose anonymous 1947 article in the journal Foreign Affairs, signed ”X,” defined America’s cold-war containment policy for 40 years. ”I was particularly bothered by the references to Russia as a country dying to attack Western Europe. Don’t people understand? Our differences in the cold war were with the Soviet Communist regime. And now we are turning our backs on the very people who mounted the greatest bloodless revolution in history to remove that Soviet regime.
”And Russia’s democracy is as far advanced, if not farther, as any of these countries we’ve just signed up to defend from Russia,” said Mr. Kennan, who joined the State Department in 1926 and was U.S. Ambassador to Moscow in 1952. ”It shows so little understanding of Russian history and Soviet history. Of course there is going to be a bad reaction from Russia, and then [the NATO expanders] will say that we always told you that is how the Russians are — but this is just wrong.”
Did Kennan miss out anything in his prediction, do you think?
Thomas L. Friedman: “Foreign Affairs; Now a Word From X”, 2 May 1998 http://www.nytimes.com/1998/05/02/opinion/foreign-affairs-now-a-word-from-x.html
Russia the Eternal Enemy Quotations
An independent state of Georgia existed for 2 ½ years, until Trotsky’s Red Army snuffed it out in 1921. Mr Yeltsin has given its successor exactly the same amount of time. More or less secretly, Russian forces have backed rebellions by Muslims in the Abkhaz region and by Georgian followers of the former president, Zviad Gamsakhurdia. In this squeeze the current president, Eduard Shevardnadze… despairingly appealed to Moscow for help, and got it on terms that in effect mortgage his country’s independence.
The Economist, 13 Nov 93
NOTE ON QUOTATIONS and Other Stuff
I’ve been at this business for a while. I’ve been collecting quotations for a while. I do my best to find an active link for quotations from my collection that I post on my site.
But I often can’t find a live link for the early ones. So you have to take my word for it sometimes. But, I think you recognise the flavour. For example, The Economist has hated Russia since, as far as I know, Cardigan invented his sweater.
It’s actually rather interesting, now that I root through my back files, to discover (well, depressing more than interesting) how hostile the WMSM has been to Russia for how long. From the very beginning, in fact.
Even Yeltsin, after he got off his tank, was spun as Cthulhu Redevivus.
People come and go (anybody out there remember when Chernomyrdin was on the Forbes’ world billionaire list? I do. And so does my research assistant Mr Google) but the Russia The Eternal Enemy meme remains.
Personally. I don’t get it. What’s Russia ever done to us?
Russia Answers Turkey
General of the Army Sergei Shoigu stated that in accordance to the order of the Supreme Commander-in-Chief of the Russian Armed Forces, forces of the Southern military district, separate formations of Airborne troops and military transport aviation have been put on “Full” combat alert since 5 a.m. The inspection is held at the Southwestern strategic direction.
The Defence Minister noted that it was necessary to assess combat readiness condition of the Southern MD for responding different crisis situations…
The Head of the military department ordered the Commander-in-Chief of the Aerospace Forces Colonel General Viktor Bondarev to organize the inspection of the 4th Air Force and Air Defence Army including redeployment of aviation, repelling and making of massive air strikes…
The Head of the military department ordered that particular attention should be paid to the troops’ control system with deployment of mobile field control centres at full scale. Those tasks are to be carried out jointly with the Central MD…
Looking through the site shows there are a lot of other activities in the Southern Military District since this order was given on Monday. This is clearly a warning to Turkey and a preparation for acting if Turkey doesn’t take the hint.
Russia Is Finished Quotations
By sending in the tanks, Mr Yeltsin has placed the generals in the realm of politics something else that would be democrats should strive to avoid). The army is already too influential in Russia’s foreign policy. It has been behind Russia’s increasing readiness to throw its weight around in the rest of the former Soviet Union. The flash of gold braid is discernible in warnings to Poland and other members of the ex Warsaw Pact not to join NATO, and in Russia’s desire to rewrite the treaty governing conventional forces in Europe. At home, Mr Yeltsin’s need for armed support will make the generals harder to defeat in budgetary matters.
The Economist, editorial 9 Oct 93
Telling the Truth© By Lying
First the US “private, nonprofit” channel PBS (or, as they would say, were it Russian: mostly state-funded broadcaster) passed off Russian footage of strikes on Daesh oil facilities as US coalition strikes. This was easily caught because they left the Cyrillic letters on the footage.
Now their French allies have followed through. On a France 2 broadcast (or as they would say if this were something out of Russia – the fully state-owned France 2 TV station broadcast) while castigating the Russians for indiscriminate bombing, moaning about the very difficult choices that the US coalition have to make to seek out the targets, swaggering that every effort is made to avoid civilian casualties, illustrates the castigation, moaning and swaggering with….
….Russian videos.
This time they had the wit to crop the Cyrillic lettering out.
Watch the video for yourself.
The Collapse of Russia – Coming Soon!! Again!!
Stratfor – the “Shadow CIA” – has attracted some attention with its recent prediction that Russia will break apart in the next decade.
But Stratfor is very late to the party – the CIA, back around 2005, predicted that Russia “could fall apart at the seams in a decade and split into as many as eight different states”. Summarised here by The Independent.
The report, Global Trends 2015, has sparked a lively debate in Russia about the country’s territorial integrity and triggered passionate denunciations from some of Russia’s leading politicians. Its unflinchingly bleak assessment of Russia’s prospects has angered many at a time when the Russian government is doing its best to talk up the economy.
The fact that the gloomy prognosis comes from its old Cold War enemy makes it all the harder for Russia to swallow. But many ordinary Russians seem to share the CIA’s pessimism.
Blah blah blah, et cetera et cetera.
Oh, and Russia’s population is 13 million more than the CIA said it would be.
But, unfortunately for the CIA’s reputation, 2015, instead of being the Year of Russia’s Collapse turned out to be the Year of the Russian Threat Redivivus. Loudly trumpeted from all corners.
Getting back to Stratfor (The “Shadow CIA“), its prediction for 2025 is:
There will not be an uprising against Moscow, but Moscow’s withering ability to support and control the Russian Federation will leave a vacuum,” Stratfor warns. “What will exist in this vacuum will be the individual fragments of the Russian Federation.”
We expect Moscow’s authority to weaken substantially, leading to the formal and informal fragmentation of Russia” the report states, adding, “It is unlikely that the Russian Federation will survive in its current form.”
The breakout of Russia’s nuclear weapons stockpile will be “the greatest crisis of the next decade,” according to Stratfor.
And the US will have to figure out what to do about it, even if it means dispatching ground troops to secure loose weapons, materials, and delivery systems.
Note the quaint assumption that the USA will be in any sort of condition in ten years to do anything much anywhere.
So, I guess that Stratfor’s claim to the title of “Shadow CIA” mostly comes from its use of the CIA’s old, discarded and worn out crystal balls.
Either that or we have to believe that Russia breaks apart every decade and miraculously re-assembles itself without anyone noticing.
Russia Observer 