As a certified “dupe of Putin” in the
eyes of our McCarthyite, mob rule majority that speaks for the American foreign
policy establishment, I use this opportunity to restate my claim to independent
thinking about the big issues of responsibility for the ongoing and escalating
New Cold War, including each and every major incident along the way.
If only there were no consequences
for you, dear reader, for myself and for the 7 billion plus other souls on this
planet, I would say “a pox on both your houses” in address to the political
leaderships of both the US-EU “global community” (formerly known as the “free
world”) and the Russian Federation (formerly known as the “empire of
evil”). However, any such curse will rebound on us.
To put it in the language of the once
fashionable MIT bard of the 1960s Tom Lehrer: “we will all go together when we
go.” For this reason, let us take the time to sort out where this spiral
of action and reaction, where the mutual contempt and provocations are taking
us and what, if anything, we simple mortals outside government can do about it.
It is axiomatic in these days of
anti-Russian hysteria in Washington, in London, in Brussels, that whatever
reverses there may be to political control by the globalist, liberal democracy
elites with their new age culture of pro-women, pro-LGBT, pro multiculturalism,
etc. agendas you can be sure the cry will go up: “the Russians did it.”
The Russians were responsible for the sports doping of the 2014 Sochi
Winter Olympics, where they captured the lion’s share of gold medals.
They were responsible for the annexation of Crimea and intervened militarily
with “hybrid warfare” to protect the insurgencies in the Donbass. They were
responsible for the MH-17 airliner crash. They hacked into the Democratic
National Committee server, disseminated their anti-Clinton trove of documents
via Wikileaks and otherwise interfered egregiously in the 2016 US presidential
elections. They have supported the criminal regime of Bashar Assad in Syria who
uses chemical weapons against his own civilian population. Most recently the
Kremlin organized the chemical poisoning of their ex-spy Sergei Skripal and his
daughter Yulia in Salisbury, England using their chemical warfare agent
Novichok.
The official Russian response to most
of these allegations of misdeeds has been “show us the proof,” or let us
investigate this incident jointly, as our shared international conventions
require. Their main weapon of self-defense has been to pour scorn on
their accusers. Brimming with sarcasm, Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov has
repeatedly mocked British PM Theresa May for relying on unproven but “highly
likely” argumentation in support of her clamoring for ever more sanctions to be
imposed on Russia.
In fact, it has been my peers in the
small Russia-friendly camp of Western experts who have published articles
detailing the holes in the narratives of Russian wrong-doing put out by US and
European media with government backing. Some of my colleagues have relevant
professional knowledge in military sciences, in Information Systems and how
they operate to support their point for point refutations of the allegations
against Russia. Others do not have any added value to contribute, but
nonetheless do not stop at the water’s edge; instead they plunge into highly technical
aspects of the charges against Russia and counter-charges.
As a general rule, I have stayed
clear of these debates on anti-Russian narratives in their details, seeing no
possibility of contributing anything new. When I have spoken on scandals
of the day, as for example the Skripal case, I have addressed only the
overarching question of whether the allegations made any sense if the
investigator applied the acid test of cui bono, meaning whose
interests could be served by the given crime. And on this basis I found
the entire case against the Kremlin to be without merit.
It would have been nonsensical for
the Kremlin to murder a former spy who had served his time, had been pardoned
and expelled to his handlers in London, and to do this after the passage of
many years just a couple of weeks before the opening of the World Cup of
Football in Russia, for which the country had invested more than $10 billion in
an exercise of Soft Power. On the other hand, for MI6 to have staged this
assassination attempt at a location very close to its Porton Down chemical
weapons facility as a provocation to blacken the image of Russia at precisely
that moment, ahead of a sporting event that would attract the attention of
global audiences, makes perfect sense in the context of an escalating
information, economic and geopolitical war and the clear objective of isolating
Russia, turning it into a pariah state. Anyone who thinks that the “fair play”
Brits could not possibly be so cynical and immoral as to engage in
assassination for raisons d’état should go back to their kindergarten benches.
Those of us wearing long trousers know better.
Regrettably, recent developments have
prompted me to rethink the whole logic of cui bono under
present-day conditions when no side’s position can be taken at face value and
when, quite possibly, all sides are actively engaged in propaganda and
provocation.
I was prompted to reconsider my
position by a couple of developments in the past two weeks. The first was the
remarkable answer that Vladimir Putin gave to a questioner who asked about the
Skripal case during the meeting with the press at the Russia Energy Week
international forum in St Petersburg. This was just after the British released
what they called the real names and GRU affiliations of the two alleged
perpetrators of the poisoning. That identification directly contradicted the
Russian president’s assertion at the Eastern Economic forum in Vladivostok 12
September, when he claimed the two were ordinary civilians, “not criminals.”
Now Putin called Sergey Skripal not
only treasonous but подонок, a term sometimes translated as riff-raff but more
pungently translatable as “scum.” That Putin dropped all pretense of diplomacy
suggested strongly to me that there is more to the issue than meets the eye and
that his prevarication was exposed.
A still bigger prompt to rethink came
a few days later when Sergei Lavrov responded to the breaking news that in
April the Dutch had expelled 4 Russians carrying service passports who had been
caught near the headquarters of the world chemical weapons inspection
organization (OPCW) in a rented car which had electronic snooping
equipment in the trunk.
Under circumstances which appear to
be fairly straightforward and are proven by published photos, Lavrov could have
acknowledged that Russian agents were nailed but gone on to explain the reasons
justifying the intended hacking into OPCW computers, namely the way Western
powers have actively compromised the impartiality of the institution’s
activities as regards the supposed chemical attacks in Syria and in the Skripal
case.
Lavrov did not do that. Instead he
presented a cock and bull story that the 4 chaps whom the Dutch police nabbed
were there to do routine security checks on the Russian embassy. And the
Russian Foreign Ministry went on the offensive, charging the Dutch with
violating a gentlemen’s agreement about the case, going public only months
later at a politically opportune moment.
To be sure, I never believed that the
leadership and state entities of the Russian Federation were bunny rabbits. But
their image as mostly truthful and sincere about seeking peaceful relations
with the West was badly tarnished by these latest developments.
Moreover my concerns from these
developments fit into a context of disillusionment with the degree of
impartiality of Russian state television, which, as recently as a year ago I
still found bracing. Apart from the coverage earlier this year of the
presidential electoral campaign and in particular the granting of air time to
uncensored debates among the candidates, Russian state television has steadily
displaced genuine news, commentary and talk shows with repetitive heavy
propaganda. The share of broadcasting given to the overall situation in
Ukraine and to the civil war in Donbass, in particular, has become
mind-numbing.
Over the past couple of years,
Russian state television has daily disseminated the view that Ukraine is one
step away from economic and political collapse. This is patently untrue. On the
major Russian political talk shows we see the same Ukrainian crazies and the
same smug Russian politicians engaged in sterile thrust and repartee. And
the tone of presenters, such as Yevgeni Popov and Olga Skabeeva on the widely
watched talk show “60 Minutes” has become shrill and offensive.
Taking all of these observations into
account, I conclude that a significant part of the Russian ruling elites stands
for worsening relations with the West, and that their cui bono would
be well served by events like the Skripal poisoning, all the more so if it were
carried out in such manner as to be identifiably Kremlin sponsored and lead to
the scandalous rupture of relations with the United Kingdom that ensued.
In this overall concept of what is
occurring, we have mirror images in Russia and the USA of Deep States that
earnestly seek a New Cold War as a confirmation of national identity. The
confrontation is more than a tool to hold onto power. It is the means of
ensuring allocation of state resources to the military industrial complexes.
In the Russian case, the
confrontation, with its sanctions and embargos has made possible a
reindustrialization that eluded the Russian state under conditions of friendly
relations with the West and allocations of investment funds along purely
market-dictated terms, which meant high concentration of investment in the
exploration, production and export of hydrocarbons at the expense of all other
industrial sectors.
As for the United States and Europe,
the New Cold War has reinvigorated the moribund NATO alliance, given it a
purpose for existence and heavy investment in expansion. It has given a new
lease on life to American global hegemony.
So what can we, the peoples do about
this?
The first thing is to try harder to
get our minds around the challenge. Batting down false narratives put up
by Western media is a futile and insufficient response. There are ever more
false flag provocations in the pipeline and no one outside a small circle of
experts takes an interest in the often highly technical elements of such argumentation.
The way forward has to be political
mobilization of an anti-war movement that is not engaged in the blame game, but
rises above it in the knowledge that all sides in the New Cold
War are lying, posturing and engaging in propaganda at our expense. Until
and unless political activists can focus their minds on this single objective
of a broad anti-war coalition the world will continue its creep towards Armageddon.
©Gilbert
Doctorow, 2018
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