The Russians Are Coming, Again. John Marciano
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nuclear modernization program, prompted in part by lobbying undertaken by the Bechtel Corporation, that includes the development of new nuclear-tipped weapons whose size and “smart” technology, according to a leading general, ensures that the use of nuclear arms is “no longer unthinkable.”6
Russia, not surprisingly, has viewed these policies with alarm, putting five new strategic nuclear missile regiments into service in 2016, intensifying development of long-range precision-guided weapons and a galaxy of surveillance drones, and stepping up support for the Bashar al-Assad government in Syria. Former secretary of defense William J. Perry is among those who believe that the danger of nuclear catastrophe stemming from the renewed arms race is “greater today than during the Cold War.”7
As during the original Cold War, U.S. arms manufacturers have fueled the escalation by lobbying Washington and NATO to maintain high levels of military spending, aided by hired-gun think tanks and professional experts. As retired Army General Richard Cody, a vice president at L-3 Communications, the seventh-largest U.S. defense contractor, explained to shareholders in December 2015, the industry faces a historic opportunity. Following the end of the Cold War, peace had “pretty much broken out all over the world,” with Russia in decline and NATO nations celebrating. “The Wall came down,” he said, and “all defense budgets went south.”8
Reversing this slide toward peace required the creation of new foreign enemies including the perception of a revived Russian imperialism, even though U.S. military spending, totaling $609 billion in 2016, dwarfs that of Russia, which spent $65 billion that year.9
TRAGEDY, THEN FARCE
Karl Marx famously wrote in The Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte that history repeats itself “first as tragedy, then as farce.”10 If the First Cold War (1917–1991) was a tragedy, the Second Cold War is playing out as Marx predicted: a farce. During the First Cold War, there was at least some semblance of legitimacy in that the Soviets had infiltrated at least one verifiable spy in the Manhattan Project (Klaus Fuchs) even if the fear of domestic subversion was ultimately grossly overblown, and some aspects of the “evil empire” lived up to this moniker. However, in the New Cold War, the Democrats, backed by most of the media have accused Donald Trump, a U.S. capitalist original and an arch-imperialist, of being a “Manchurian Candidate” surrounded by disloyal agents, which is preposterous. The agents include Trump’s wealthy son-in-law and his attorney general, who is a living monument to the Confederacy.
The charge of election interference has been accepted by most of the media even though intelligence agencies—whose legitimacy was already at a low point following the Weapons of Mass Destruction (WMD) debacle in Iraq—released a report so bereft of actual evidence they could only make an “assessment.” Forensic specialists working with dissenting intelligence veterans asserted that the hack on the email server of the Democratic National Committee chairman was the result of a leak by someone on the inside carried out in the eastern time zone.11
The greatest irony of the Second Cold War is surely the importance of former Communist Party USA leader Earl Browder’s grandson, William, a hedge fund manager in Russia sentenced in absentia to nine years in prison for failing to pay 552 million rubles in taxes ($16 million), in leading the lobby for economic sanctions. Browder has spread what appears to be a misleading story about a man he said was his lawyer, Sergey Magnitsky, who was actually an accountant, dying suspiciously after exposing a $230 million Russian government tax scam (the first blacklisted film of the Second Cold War, a documentary blocked from commercial distribution, has unearthed evidence that Browder made up the Magnitsky story to cover up his own orchestration of the scam).12 To make matters worse, one of the primary villains of the new Cold War, WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange, is an Australian national, so no one can accuse him of treason like the Rosenbergs or Alger Hiss. And there is no Whittaker Chambers who has emerged with a hidden cache of documents to aid the government’s case or savvy political opportunists like Richard Nixon to exploit the situation. All we have now is the childish Trump-Comey (former FBI director) standoff and a Senate investigation seizing on any connection between Trump supporters and the Russian government as a sign of disloyalty, which has exposed almost nothing.13
No figure has driven the new Cold War frenzy more than Russia’s ex-KGB president, Vladimir Vladimirovich Putin, who earned the ire of the American establishment with his dreams of restoring Russia’s great-power status. Putin, however, is unlikely to be hiding any gulags or show trials that could inspire moral purpose behind U.S. foreign policy at a time when the post–Second World War victory culture has receded. Furthermore, Putin is a conservative traditionalist who improved Russia’s economy from the damage done by the “Harvard Boys” and other shock therapists in the 1990s and reasserted Russian power without the bloodshed of Stalin.14 Public opprobrium may thus be hard to sustain this time around, though the scapegoating of Russia functions as a distraction for a ruling class that has otherwise lost its legitimacy. THE RUSSIANS ARE COMING, AGAIN provides a historical perspective on contemporary U.S.-Russian relations that emphasizes how the absence of historical consciousness has resulted in a repetition of past follies. The first chapter discusses the new Cold War, with a focus on the Russophobic discourse and demonization of Putin in the New York Times and its political implications. The second chapter goes back in history to uncover the forgotten U.S. invasion of Soviet Russia in 1918–1920, which was carried out without the consent of Congress, and was opposed by the military commander in Siberia, William S. Graves, who considered it a violation of Russia’s sovereignty.
The next four chapters provide a panoramic history of the Cold War, showing how it was an avoidable tragedy. Included in our discussion are the imperatives of class rule that drove the United States to expand its hegemony worldwide, the warping of the American political economy through excessive military spending, the purges and witchhunts, and the Cold War’s adverse effect on the black community and unions. The final chapter delves into the Cold War’s effect on Third World nations, which suffered from proxy wars and ill-conceived regime change operations. We also spotlight the era’s victims and dissidents, whose wisdom and courage may yet inspire a new generation of radicals.
The alarmism about Russia today has served to reinvigorate a traditional Soviet-phobia that draws on a deeper European tradition in which Russian perfidy and aggression have been used to rationalize imperialistic policies.15 Bill Browder, a key figure lobbying for the new Cold War, depicts Russia in his book Red Notice: A True Story of High-Finance, Murder and One Man’s Fight for Justice as a hopelessly corrupt, violent, and lawless country that supposedly enlightened Western entrepreneurs like himself could not save and now had to punish.16 Two generations earlier, President Harry S. Truman explained Stalin by referring to a forged document purporting to show that Russian tsar Peter the Great had developed a blueprint for conquering Europe.17 The “Father of Containment” doctrine, George F. Kennan, argued that those who wanted to extend goodwill to the Soviets had no real understanding of the malicious Russian character, which he said had been shaped by geography and a history of invasion by “Asian hordes.” According to Kennan, the “return of Stalin, a native of the Asiatic country of Georgia holding court in the barbaric splendor of the Moscow Kremlin,” confirmed that the “Bolshevik revolution had stripped Russia of its brittle veneer of European culture,” embraced since the reign of Peter the Great. “The technique of Russian diplomacy,” adopted by Stalin, “like that of the Orient … is concentrated in impressing an adversary with the terrifying strength of Russian power while keeping him uncertain and confused as to the exact channels of most of its applications.”18
This prejudicial attitude and suspicion made peaceful cooperation impossible then as now. Stalin, like Putin, did not actually act too aggressively or irrationally if we consider the history of U.S. invasion, coupled with the Soviet experience in the Second World War, and the fact that the United States virtually encircled the Soviet Union with military bases after the war. In the late 1940s, CIA director Walter Bedell Smith was so confident that the Soviets would not “undertake a deliberate military attack on … our concentrations of aircraft at Wiesbaden [Germany]” that he would “not hesitate to go there and sit on the field myself.”19
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