There's an absurdity to humanity's current predicament of standing on the brink of World War III. This is that the decisive factor behind why the U.S. and Russia are close to war has not been the geopolitical struggles, the economic competition, or the imperialist military encirclement around Russia, but the strange and insipid tools that the imperialists have used to bring these factors to the present point. Their sabotage of the international balance wouldn't have been possible without the paranoid, conspiratorial, and consequently goofy propaganda campaigns that Washington has carried out throughout the last decade's new cold war.
To make sense of the present tensions, we need to delve into these wild stories, why they've been so influential, and where they're leading us.
Neocons give rise to a special American obsession with conquering Russia
The historical precedent for today's anti-Russian psychological operations is initially obvious: Cold War anti-communism. The notions about the Reds infiltrating Hollywood, aiming to invade the United States, and being analogous to movie monsters like The Blob established Russians as the enemy. More importantly, these paranoid mass-persuasion campaigns got Americans to abandon their sense of self-awareness when it comes to these kinds of issues; it should be self-evidently ridiculous to uncritically accept that Americans are under threat from some all-encompassing foreign enemy, especially since Americans are the ones who are constantly meddling in the affairs of other countries. The manipulative nature of the propaganda is too transparent. But the Cold War's ideology of aggressive nationalism negated this potential for self-reflection, letting Americans be sure in their embrace of an absurd worldview.
Anti-communism was integral to these manipulations. Yet when it's come to Russia, the jingoism and xenophobia have persisted beyond when the country stopped being socialist. As Eric Zuesse has observed:
Though the billionaires succeeded, during the first Cold War - the one that was nominally against communism - at fooling the public to think they were aiming ultimately to conquer communism, George Herbert Walker Bush made clear, on the night of 24 February 1990, privately to the leaders of the U.S. aristocracy's foreign allies, that the actual goal was world-conquest, and so the Cold War would now secretly continue on the U.S. side, even after ending on the U.S.S.R. side. When GHW Bush did that, the heritage of U.S. Senator Jackson became no longer the formerly claimed one, of 'anti-communism', but was, clearly now and henceforth, anti-Russian. And that's what it is today not only in the Democratic Party, and not only in the Republican Party, and not only in the United States, but throughout the entire U.S. alliance.
And this is what we are seeing today, in all of the U.S.-and-allied propaganda-media. America is always 'the injured party' against 'the aggressors'; and, so, one after another, such as in Iraq, and in Libya, and in Syria, and in Iran, and in Yemen, and in China, all allies (or even merely friends) of Russia are 'the aggressors' and are 'dictatorships' and are 'threats to America', and only the U.S. side represents 'democracy'.
Now Americans apply the same attitude from the Cold War to any given modern country that's disobedient towards the empire - whether north Korea, China, Iran, or the current primary propaganda target Russia. The typical sentiments towards these countries share a pathological focus on portraying them as the villains of the world - as aggressors, human rights abusers, enemies of "democracy," and generally untrustworthy. It doesn't matter how little substance is attached to these perceptions. They're not meant to be carefully considered analyses; they're meant to be cultural mantras, as essential to the U.S. empire's mythology as the 4th of July or Thanksgiving.
This is at least the general, cruder version of the worldview that the neocons have instilled within the U.S. population. It stems from a more coherent, strategically focused set of teachings that became solidified within the Washington orthodoxy in reaction to U.S. imperialism's decline. Even prior to 9/11, and to the subsequent collapse of U.S. hegemony, the neocon thought leaders were making the case for their military-adventurist agenda by warning of a coming slide in Washington's influence. The neocon Project for the New American Century's 2000 report on "rebuilding America's defenses," which is infamous for its suggestion that an attack on U.S. soil would help rally support for greater military spending, concludes that "even a global Pax Americana will not preserve itself. Paradoxically, as American power and influence are at their apogee, American military forces limp toward exhaustion, unable to meet the demands of their many and varied missions, including preparing for tomorrow's battlefield."
Since then, as the U.S. has reached the same point of rapid-onset collapse as all previous empires - ironically set off by the Afghanistan and Iraq invasions that the neocons pushed through - their cult of Russophobia has proportionately grown. The issues with U.S. military logistics and control that the Project identifies have been blamed on international scapegoats, primarily the Russians and the Chinese. American Russophobia has been modified to go deeper than anti-communism, though associating Putin with a hammer and sickle is a favorite tactic for today's liberals. The neocons have gotten those within the NATO propaganda bubble to direct their fear and hostility in tandem with the geopolitical aims the empire has for Eurasia, namely: imperialist coups in Russia and Kazakhstan, and the subduing of China. Paranoia about Marxism taking over has evolved into a simple fear of the other, not necessarily dependent on the economic ideology of the other. What matters is that the other threatens imperial control.
This persistence of xenophobic militarism, irrespective of socioeconomic ideology, reflects the effectiveness with which the left has been brought into the new cold war's mentality.
War hysteria, racism, & McCarthyism on all ends of the U.S. political spectrum
To be technically accurate, the U.S. left didn't need to be brought over to the new cold war, because neoconservatism originated within the U.S. left itself. The founding members of the neoconservative movement were originally part of the Cold War era's Trotskyist faction. Ideologies don't appear out of nowhere; they evolve out of previous tendencies. And for neoconservatism, the parent tendency was the intensely sectarian, virulently anti-Soviet faction of "Marxists" who naturally found a significant foothold in the Cold War era's "left" intelligentsia. Christopher Hitchens, whose hyperbolic anti-Sovietism from a Trotskyist perspective led to him defending the Iraq invasion, is one example of this infamous "trot to neocon" pipeline.
Today's versions of Hitchens bash Russia, China, Cuba, Iran, Chavismo Venezuela, Lukashenko's Belarus, Assad's Syria, the DPRK, and every other anti-imperialist country under the pretense of wanting to be "principled" in their critiques of "authoritarianism." "Democratic socialist" groups like Jacobin and the DSA have gone so far as to facilitate platforms that vilify U.S. regime-change targets like Nicaragua and Cuba, platforms that have been hosted by actual imperialist regime-change agents. In this environment, there's no room for an authentic anti-imperialist movement. Even explicitly fascist U.S.-backed movements around the globe, like Ukraine's Euromaidan and the recent ultra-nationalist terrorist insurgency in Kazakhstan, get the tacit approval of the primary "leftist" figures. So imperialist fearmongering can thrive unchecked across the whole U.S. ideological spectrum.
This was apparent when it was the liberals, many of whom had formerly been anti-war, that led the new campaign to demonize Russia following the 2016 election. Integral to their embrace of militarism and xenophobia was a partisan-motivated trust in intelligence agencies, which led to the figures within these agencies proliferating the worst kinds of reactionary garbage; during the "Russiagate" hysteria, former Director of National Intelligence James Clapper claimed that Slavs are genetically specialized towards lying and cheating.
This and the other angles of attack that liberals utilized during Russiagate's first years, from homophobic depictions of Trump with Putin to demagogic imagery of Red Square bearing down upon the White House to unhinged statements about the U.S. having been "invaded," solidified the neocon orthodoxy among Democrats - to the point where the Democratic Party was rehabilitating the image of George W. Bush, portraying him as representing a nostalgic era. It was this utilization of the U.S. empire's two-party oligopoly that perfectly carried through the foreign policy goals of the neocons. With Trump's opposition continuously denouncing him as a Russian agent, he became willing to go even further in antagonizing Russia than Obama had. He expanded sanctions on Russia, armed Ukraine's belligerently anti-Russian fascist regime, approved expanding NATO into Montenegro, struck Syria multiple times to the effect of inflaming tensions with Russia, and sabotaged U.S.-Russia nuclear arms agreements.
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