It was only in the 1980s when I began to do the serious research that resulted in my first book, which later became Killing Hope, that I was able to fill in the details and realize that the United States had indeed masterminded that particular coup or assassination, and many other coups and assassinations, not to mention countless bombings, chemical and biological warfare, perversion of elections, drug dealings, kidnappings, and much more that had not appeared in the American mainstream media or schoolbooks. (And a significant portion of which was apparently unknown to the Soviets as well.)
But there have been countless revelations about US crimes in the past two decades. Many Americans and much of the rest of the planet have become educated. They're much more skeptical of American proclamations and the fawning media.
President Obama recently declared: "The strong condemnation that it's received from around the world indicates the degree to which Russia is on the wrong side of history on this."[6] Marvelous ... coming from the man who partners with jihadists and Nazis and has waged war against seven nations. In the past half century is there any country whose foreign policy has received more bitter condemnation than the United States? If the United States is not on the wrong side of history, it may be only in the history books published by the United States.
Barack Obama, like virtually all Americans, likely believes that the Soviet Union, with perhaps the sole exception of the Second World War, was consistently on the wrong side of history in its foreign policy as well as at home. Yet, in a survey conducted by an independent Russian polling center this past January, and reported in the Washington Post in April, 86 percent of respondents older than 55 expressed regret for the Soviet Union's collapse; 37 percent of those aged 25 to 39 did so.[7]
(Similar poll results have been reported regularly since the demise of the Soviet Union. This is from USA Today in 1999: "When the Berlin Wall crumbled, East Germans imagined a life of freedom where consumer goods were abundant and hardships would fade. Ten years later, a remarkable 51% say they were happier with communism.")[8]
Or as the new Russian proverb put it: "Everything the Communists said about Communism was a lie, but everything they said about capitalism turned out to be the truth."
A week before the above Post report in April the newspaper printed an article about happiness around the world, which contains the following charming lines: "Worldwide polls show that life seems better to older people -- except in Russia." ... "Essentially, life under President Vladimir Putin is one continuous downward spiral into despair." ... "What's going on in Russia is deep unhappiness." ... "In Russia, the only thing to look forward to is death's sweet embrace."[9]
No, I don't think it was meant to be any kind of satire. It appears to be a scientific study, complete with graphs, but it reads like something straight out of the 1950s.
The views Americans hold of themselves and other societies are not necessarily more distorted than the views found amongst people elsewhere in the world, but the Americans' distortion can lead to much more harm. Most Americans and members of Congress have convinced themselves that the US/NATO encirclement of Russia is benign -- we are, after all, the Good Guys -- and they don't understand why Russia can't see this.
The first Cold War, from Washington's point of view, was often designated as one of "containment," referring to the US policy of preventing the spread of communism around the world, trying to block the very idea of communism or socialism. There's still some leftover from that -- see Venezuela and Cuba, for example -- but the new Cold War can be seen more in terms of a military strategy. Washington thinks in terms of who could pose a barrier to the ever-expanding empire adding to its bases and other military necessities.
Whatever the rationale, it's imperative that the United States suppress any lingering desire to bring Ukraine (and Georgia) into the NATO alliance. Nothing is more likely to bring large numbers of Russian boots onto the Ukrainian ground than the idea that Washington wants to have NATO troops right on the Russian border and in spitting distance of the country's historic Black Sea naval base in Crimea.
The myth of Soviet expansionismOne still comes across references in the mainstream media to Russian "expansionism" and "the Soviet empire," in addition to that old favorite "the evil empire." These terms stem largely from erstwhile Soviet control of Eastern European states. But was the creation of these satellites following World War II an act of imperialism or expansionism? Or did the decisive impetus lie elsewhere?
Within the space of less than 25 years, Western powers had invaded Russia three times -- the two world wars and the "Intervention" of 1918-20 -- inflicting some 40 million casualties in the two wars alone. To carry out these invasions, the West had used Eastern Europe as a highway. Should it be any cause for wonder that after World War II the Soviets wanted to close this highway down? In almost any other context, Americans would have no problem in seeing this as an act of self defense. But in the context of the Cold War such thinking could not find a home in mainstream discourse.
The Baltic states of the Soviet Union -- Estonia, Latvia, and Lithuania -- were not part of the highway and were frequently in the news because of their demands for more autonomy from Moscow, a story "natural" for the American media. These articles invariably reminded the reader that the "once independent" Baltic states were invaded in 1939 by the Soviet Union, incorporated as republics of the USSR, and had been "occupied" ever since. Another case of brutal Russian imperialism. Period. History etched in stone.
The three countries, it happens, were part of the Russian empire from 1721 up to the Russian Revolution of 1917, in the midst of World War I. When the war ended in November 1918, and the Germans had been defeated, the victorious Allied nations (US, Great Britain, France, et al.) permitted/encouraged the German forces to remain in the Baltics for a full year to crush the spread of Bolshevism there; this, with ample military assistance from the Allied nations. In each of the three republics, the Germans installed collaborators in power who declared their independence from the new Bolshevik state which, by this time, was so devastated by the World War, the revolution, and the civil war prolonged by the Allies' intervention, that it had no choice but to accept the fait accompli. The rest of the fledgling Soviet Union had to be saved.
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