Imperial Demon Watch: Vladimir Putin

 Russia wants a peaceful Ukraine, Americans prefer one at war.

-------Israel Shamir, "Putin Prefers a Bad Peace"

Even before the outbreak of war in Ukraine, U.S.-Russian relations had descended to a lower point than even U.S.-Soviet relations had reached during the Cuban Missile Crisis. We've been courting nuclear annihilation for some time.

Those who would like to exempt Washington from blame now will have to account for U.S. hostility towards Russia and the USSR, both of which long pre-date anything that could remotely be construed as provocation by Putin. After all, the United States invaded and occupied the former USSR from 1918-1920, maintained a harshly belligerent stance all during the Cold War, and unleashed a plague of financial locusts to loot state enterprises throughout the former USSR as soon as the Berlin Wall came down, while enrolling the newly "independent" states into an anti-Moscow military alliance that extended to the very borders of Russia. Standards of living plunged, death rates soared, diplomacy suffocated, and Boris Yeltsin's proposed U.S.-Russian partnership was immediately forgotten.  

If a China-Russia alliance had installed hostile governments in Canada and Mexico at the end of WWII, after which all of Latin America went full Communist while narco-terrorists began killing thousands of Anglo Texans and banning English, it's unlikely any blame would fall on Washington if it attempted to resolve the situation by force, as it surely would. So we can dismiss pious moral grandstanding about the "evil" Putin as the boundless hypocrisy it transparently is.

Furthermore, the rhetoric employed in this propaganda effort is curious and irrational. For example, labeling Putin a "war criminal" actually legitimizes war, since it implies there is some ethical or at least inoffensive way to conduct mass slaughter, which is all that modern warfare is. Transparent attempts to miss this point by labelling massacre "collateral damage" should be dismissed with ridicule.

And let us here note that the USA is far and away the guiltiest "criminal" where war is concerned, having by far the greatest war industry ever seen in human history headquartered on its soil and forming the heart of its economy (the Defense Industrial Base), which it has used to fight an endless series of wars directly or by proxy throughout the world for the past eighty years. No other contemporary or historical power has achieved anything close to this commitment to mass killing.

Thus, it is absurd to define the situation in Ukraine as a uniquely evil instance of military aggression by Vladimir Putin. In a world of asymmetrical power with no effective world government, technically sophisticated powers always have the upper hand in violent conflicts with their neighbors, which are inevitable. And, of course, they insist on having friendly neighbors, preferably cooperative, though submissive will do. 

Hostile neighbors no one accepts. How much of the Americas does the United States permit be part of a hostile military alliance? According to the Monroe Doctrine, not one square inch. How did Washington react to Cuba installing Soviet nuclear missiles 90 miles from Florida in 1962? (Spoiler alert: it nearly blew up the planet.) What did the media do when Rafael Correa jokingly proposed an Ecuadorian military base in Miami to balance Washington's Mena Air Base in Ecuador? It laughed, though the punchline is far from a joke.

A majority of the world is fed-up with the hypocrisies of unilateral world order under U.S. control, and is not averse to accommodating an emerging China-Russia-India based new world order. Yes, the current war in Ukraine will cause further expansion of NATO, but this, in turn, will devour resources needed to stave off European economic collapse, while an emerging Russia-China-India alliance accelerates the collapse of the U.S. dollar as the world's reserve currency. 

In Saudi Arabia, a U.S. client state, Biden's phone calls in the early stages of the current war went unanswered while Putin's were cordially received. Got respect?

Our mind managers warn us of the horrors of forced neutrality via Finlandization, and urge instead that we strive for regime change in Moscow. Strange. Finland is a success story, having achieved balance and stability via social democratic prosperity. On the other hand, U.S.-fostered regime change converts countries into corpse-strewn wastelands on a regular basis. Think Afghanistan, Iraq, Syria, and Libya. Trying out this strategy on Russia would obviously carry a high risk of nuclear annihilation. What stupendous prize awaits us if we successfully navigate this potentially species-terminating risk? The preservation of "our interests and our values," as Hillary Clinton so loves to say.

Apparently, converting whole cities to radioactive ash is a small price to pay for preserving our favorite abstractions.

We hear Putin is a strongman, an authoritarian, a dictator. Was Abraham Lincoln one, he who suspended habeas corpus, jailed journalists, shut down hundreds of newspapers, and locked up thousands of political enemies? Was Woodrow Wilson, who destroyed unions, imprisoned editors, and shut down newspapers, assuming dictatorial control of finance, the press, the farms, and commerce and transportation? 

Was FDR, who burned more civilians alive in a single night than either atomic bomb killed six months later? 

Maybe Putin is a dictator. But a major part of Russian, state-owned media transmits pro-Western, anti-Russian content, paid for by Russian taxpayers. Try and find taxpayer-funded, Putin-sympathetic content that reaches mass audiences in the U.S. Good luck.

What about free speech? The Russian people have never had it, and therefore don't care much about it. Americans have it in theory, but find its political potency nullified in practice by tsunamis of state and corporate propaganda.  The most popular use of speech in the contemporary U.S. is not to reveal errors of argument and evidence, but to denounce others for being "idiots."

Is Putin a nationalist? State-enterprise CEOs in Russia earn millions of rubles a year while everyone else has to tighten their belts.  The Russian central bank buys U.S. Treasury Bonds and supports the U.S. dollar at the expense of the ruble.

Is Putin anti-democratic? The annexation of Crimea was overwhelmingly supported by Crimeans (97% vote).

Did Putin back Assad? Yes, as he was the legitimate head of state in Syria, while the alternative was rule by Islamic terrorists supported by the United States and Israel, but no sane person in Syria. Israel wants the dismemberment of Syria in order to keep the Golan Heights forever. 

Much demonology is spouted from the simple fact that Putin is the former head of the K.G.B. But Putin is critical of the Bolsheviks and is not himself a Communist. Nevertheless, he considers the demise of the USSR a "world tragedy," since overnight twenty-five million Russians found themselves foreigners living in fourteen new countries.

Is Putin anti-Israel? Well, Daesh oil flowed to Israel, and Putin said nothing, valuing his relations with then Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu. Israel, of course, supported Al-Nusra, and they were declared terrorists by the United Nations. But Israel is admirable by definition, because . . . the Holocaust.

We are told that no threat to the Russian state exists, so therefore no cause for war in Ukraine exists. But the Russian state and everything else can be blown off the map in a matter of minutes. The fact that the world is wired up to explode in a nuclear holocaust has been an American initiative from the beginning, and its dominant enemy has been (1) the USSR, and (2) Russia. NATO is by definition hostile to Russia, and lost even an ostensible reason for existing in 1991 with the dissolution of the Warsaw Pact. Why is it still around? Because Russia is still around, and Washington doesn't like that fact. Its efforts to achieve regime change in Moscow can and may end human civilization, which isn't likely to improve matters for Ukrainians. 

Is Putin an extremist? No. There is nothing radical in him. He has no plans for social re-arrangement. He merely seeks to have Russia respected as an independent, wealthy, and "great" nation, and yes, he wants Russia to be treated as an equal. But he also wants to fit into the world, not rebel against it. These modest ambitions are a threat to US/NATO hegemony and world dominance, which represent the triumph of Western extremism.

Keeping things in perspective, Putin is a Russian patriot. He wants to see Russia be a strong, healthy country where people lead good lives, are happy, and Russia occupies a prominent position internationally. He's not a chauvinist or reactionary nationalist. 

The Orange Revolution was totally unexpected in Russia, which has no real political opposition. There is no one who embodies and represents the views of a Russian majority. Having said that, Putin has been something of the "golden boy" in Russian politics for the past generation. He is good at addressing issues and speaking in clear terms that average people understand. The initial "democracy" of the Yeltsin period has been curtailed, but the middle class is developing rapidly.  

Yeltsin spoke to the U.S. Congress in 1992, and offered Washington a partnership in which each nation would treat the other as an equal. For thirty years now the U.S. has rejected this. In the year of the U.S./NATO attack on Serbia, Yeltsin protested, "Russia is not Haiti. You can't treat us like Haiti."* Washington considers Haiti a "shithole" country, as one of America's more honest presidents memorably put it.

Washington is incapable of giving Russia its due diplomatic respect. According to the reigning "Wolfowitz Doctrine," the U.S. should dominate the world and not allow any rivals for power to emerge. Russia therefore is and should be treated as a second rate power. This is a non-negotiable position. 

Naturally, Putin does not accept this, and never accepted the U.S. view that Russia lost the Cold War. Russia saw the end of the Cold War as an opportunity for them to become part of the international community. At the core of Russian beliefs is that Russia must be a Great Power. The Russian people have never doubted that Russia is a great country. Having their noses rubbed in the Wolfowitz Doctrine year after year is an open invitation to nuclear war.

The USSR's forcing its rule onto Eastern Europe was a big mistake, though understandable given two Western invasions in a generation that left much of the country a smoldering ruin. The U.S. ignoring the possibility of Russia "coming back" to international prominence was a big American mistake. Washington continues to think of Russia as at most a regional power whose wants and needs can be ignored.

At the end of the Cold War the U.S. promised not to expand NATO - not one inch - to the East, a promise that was soon violated. "You can't treat us like Haiti," protested Boris Yeltsin in 1999, as NATO planes relentlessly bombed Serbia for seventy-eight days. 

Now we wait to learn if our three-decade refusal to concede Russia minimal diplomatic respect and cooperation will eventuate in nuclear war.

Acknowledging the legitimacy of Russian grievances in Ukraine is not being "pro-Russian." It's being pro-negotiation.

* Vladimir Pozner, "The Present State of Russian-American Relations," Monterrey Summer Symposium, Middlebury Institute of International Studies, July 24, 2020