Call it negative PR (public relations), call it demonizing, call it propaganda: The anti-Putin and anti-Russian campaign continues. Putin is not an enemy of the West by anything he has done or by any illegitimate actions he has authored. He’s not hostile to the U.S., and the Russian nation is not hostile to the U.S., although he surely has begun to lose patience with the West. Neither do Putin and Russia have designs on Eastern Europe or the Baltics. Nevertheless, those who run the West’s political systems are constantly painting him as an enemy who is initiating wrongdoing on an international scale.
Putin is helping Syria recover its territory and integrity. The West hates that, because its goal is to break Syria up into pieces and undermine Iran’s ambitions. Is Putin an enemy because he has a goal in Syria that conflicts with the American goal? Syria invited Putin’s help in Syria. Yet the West wants its peoples to view Putin, not simply as a rival with legitimate interests and one who uses legitimate means (as such go among states) to achieve his goals, but as a wrongdoer making illegitimate advances and threats to peace and the international order. The West wants us to see Putin as a deadly enemy.
The latest example of this libel and slander is the campaign to blame Putin for “enabling” Assad to “gas” his own people. A French intelligence document has just been released at an opportune time stating
“…the Russian military forces active in Syria enable the regime to enjoy unquestionable air superiority, giving it the total military freedom of action it needs for its indiscriminate offensives on urban areas.”
Anyone who has followed the Syrian war knows that the tide of the war changed years ago when the Russian air forces entered the war. That’s hardly new “intelligence”. Do we really need to compare the Mosul campaign to the Aleppo campaign to see that the rest is propaganda? We are told that this document “…also says Russia aided Assad’s forces in their assault against Douma one day before the chemical weapons attack.” Clearly the French have joined the anti-Putin parade and they are trying to link Putin with the Douma gas incident. The key linkage word is enable. The key pejorative terms are “indiscriminate offensives on urban areas”.
Turn now to a remark by Nancy Pelosi: “President Trump must also hold Putin accountable for his enabling of the Assad regime’s atrocities against the Syrian people.” She uses the word “enabling” to link Putin to the pejorative terms “Assad regime’s atrocities”.
Is there a term to describe this phenomenon whereby Western agents as different as the French intelligence and Pelosi deliver almost identical accusations without apparently having to meet and coordinate? Instant propagation? Blitzkrieg propaganda? Groupthink gets them on the same page, which in this case is the anti-Putin playbook.
Putin hasn’t done a thing so out of the ordinary as behavior goes among the world’s states. The situation is the other way around: The U.S. has made itself an adversary of Russia. It’s the U.S. designs that have brought it up against Russia. The U.S. extended NATO to Eastern Europe and the Baltics. The U.S. withdrew from the ABM treaty. The U.S. installed new missiles in Poland. The U.S. injected itself into Syria unasked. The U.S. fomented revolution in Ukraine, then armed and aided the new government. The U.S. refused to accept the independence of Crimea and its joining with the Russian Federation. If Putin’s actions challenge the U.S., it is because the U.S. has inserted Americans into situations in Russia’s backyard or where Russia has historical interests.
To justify its presence where it doesn’t belong, the leaders of our Empire seek our passive support by demonizing Putin and Russia. What have Putin and Russia actually done to us or what rules have they actually broken such that we should think of them as enemies? What has our own government done to us that we may think of it as hostile to our interests and an enemy?
3:37 pm on April 15, 2018
