The Russians Are Coming, Again. John Marciano
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a kind of bedlam inhabited by abject slaves completely at the mercy of an organization of homicidal maniacs whose purpose was to destroy all traces of civilization and carry the nation back to barbarism”—a depiction that was repeated after the Second World War.20 Almost no publicity was given to atrocities committed by Admiral Kolchak, a key U.S. ally in Soviet Russia’s civil war, whose men burned villages and, according to U.S. intelligence, executed 30,000 people in one year in Siberia as part of actions that would have been considered “shameful in the Middle Ages.”21 Atrocities perpetrated by American-backed regimes like the Nazi-tainted government in Greece, Guomindang in China, or Latin American national security states were similarly sugarcoated or ignored by the “patriotic press,” whose foreign correspondents maintained symbiotic relations with the State Department and CIA.22
The media’s role in hyping the Soviet threat was epitomized by a 1951 Collier’s magazine special issue that fantasized about the U.S. overthrow of the Soviet government after the Soviets attacked U.S. cities with atomic weapons. Arthur Koestler, author of Darkness at Noon, wrote in one of the Collier’s essays that “in the Soviet slave state, human evolution” had “touched the bottom.”23 This prejudicial assessment ignored some of the major accomplishments of the Communist revolution, including its facilitation of greater economic independence, industrial growth, social equality, cultural brilliance as seen in Sergei Eisenstein’s films, Dmitri Shostakovich’s music, Boris Pasternak and Andrei Voznesensky’s poetry, and “the slave state’s” total mobilization to defeat Nazi Germany.
The Woodrow Wilson Foundation and the National Planning Association were perceptive in describing the actual threat of Communism to U.S. political and economic elites as being “the economic transformation of the communist power in ways which reduce their willingness and ability to complement the industrial economies of the West … their refusal to play the game of comparative advantage and to rely primarily on foreign investment for development.”24 General Douglas MacArthur, of all people, asserted that to sustain the Cold War the
[United States] government has kept us in a perpetual state of fear—kept us in a perpetual stampede of patriotic fervor—with the cry of a grave national emergency. Always there has been some terrible evil at home or some monstrous foreign power [Russia or China] that was going to gobble us up if we did not blindly rally behind it by furnishing the exorbitant funds demanded. Yet, in retrospect, these disasters seem never to have happened, seem never to have been quite real.25
Social conditioning combined with Russophobic prejudice thus enabled the skewed priorities in which the federal government spent an estimated $904 billion, or 57 percent of its budget, for military power from 1946 to 1967, and only $96 billion, or 6 percent, for social functions such as education, health, labor, and welfare programs. Congress rubber-stamped an arsenal of horror that included multi-megaton hydrogen bombs, intercontinental bombers with unmanned missiles, and chemical and biological weapons that had to be made operational to justify taxpayer expense.26 To contain Soviet Russian power, the U.S. further waged “limited wars” in Korea and Vietnam where it splashed oceans of napalm, defoliated the landscape, killed millions of civilians, supported drug trafficking proxies in Southeast Asia and Latin America, and unleashed chemical and likely biological warfare, while training repressive police forces in dozens of countries. The Cold War also devastated communities of leftists and activists in the United States as a result of McCarthyite witchhunts, eroding the prospects for social democracy.27
Suppressing the truth, popular commemorations of the Cold War have fixated almost exclusively on the crimes of Communism. In 1993, a bipartisan bill was passed by Congress and signed into law by Bill Clinton establishing a foundation to educate the public about the crimes of Communism and honor its victims.28 In 2007, Senator Hillary Clinton introduced legislation to establish the Cold War Medal Act to honor Cold War military veterans. Her speech referenced “our [great] victory in the Cold War” and ability to “defeat the threat from the Iron Curtain.”29 Clinton, not coincidentally, has been at the forefront promoting a confrontational policy and demonized view of Putin and Russia, and, in the style of the First Cold War, redbaited Bernie Sanders during the 2016 Democratic Party primary. She in turn is a key figure epitomizing how the distortion of public memory surrounding the first Cold War is fueling its reinvigoration today, a story this book aims to tell.
CHAPTER 1
Anti-Russian Hysteria in Propaganda and Fact
In the first part of this chapter, we will look at the new Cold War, reviewing recent accusations about Russia and its president Vladimir Putin as found in the New York Times, the “Newspaper of Record” and the most influential paper in the country. This virtually monolithic attack on Russia and its president by the Times’ leading columnists, feature writers, and editorial board has been part of “one of the biggest fake news operations in U.S. history” according to best-selling author Dan Talbot, “comparable to the yellow journalism promoted by the Hearst papers, which sold military intervention in the Spanish American War.”1
Re-invoking a historical Russophobia, the Times and media counterparts have consistently warned about a “new Russian imperialism” while casting Putin as a veritable “red devil,” as columnist Maureen Dowd termed him.2 Like all effective propaganda, there is a grain of truth to some of the allegations. However, many are unfounded or taken out of context. The U.S. role in provoking some of Putin’s actions is ignored, and inflated metaphors have been used, such as comparisons of the Russian annexation of Crimea to the German blitzkrieg and Anschluss during the Second World War.
The second part of the chapter will challenge the dominant narrative by presenting dissenting views from independent analysts who have placed the contemporary crisis with Russia in proper perspective. Unfortunately, their commentary has been confined to alternative media and hence has not been able to contain the growth of a dangerous “moral panic” that has helped precipitate the outbreak of a new Cold War.
PART I: THE OFFICIAL STORY IN THE NEW YORK TIMES
Owned since 1896 by the Ochs-Sulzberger family, which enjoys close relations with many elements of the U.S. power elite, the New York Times relies on revenues from corporate advertisers and loans from banking firms, neither of which would be pleased if the Times took positions hostile to their interests or that of the corporate community at large. Though nominally liberal in its support for environmental and financial regulation, as well as social issues, the “Newspaper of Record” quite blatantly supports the centrist wing of the Democratic Party. During the 2016 election, even its most liberal columnist, Paul Krugman, frequently ridiculed Bernie Sanders, the progressive dissident. The Times has also supported CIA covert operations and U.S. military power abroad. Its Putin-bashing, defense of NATO, and fomenting of anti-Russian hysteria can thus be placed in the larger context of the paper’s history in “manufacturing consent,” often by playing up the alleged atrocities of official government enemies while whitewashing those of its allies.3
After Putin was elected in March 2000, the Times mixed reservations about his KGB background with reassurance that he “seemed to harbor no nostalgia for the suffocating ideology of communism or the terrors carried out in its name.” It noted that he was “smart and articulate” and appeared to be “a skillful, pragmatic manager” with “some democratic credentials.”4 A June 2003 editorial stated that “Putin had done a lot to end the chaos of the Yeltsin years” and bring stability to his country and that he was a “sober, Westernizing leader” who was “prepared to cooperate with the United States and Europe.”5
Subsequent editorials encouraged “[President] Bush’s instinct to befriend Mr. Putin” and to “write a positive new chapter in relations with Moscow.” Former national security adviser and Iran-Contra felon Robert “Bud” McFarlane urged cooperation in the War on Terror, suggesting that the United States didn’t have to “choose between Russia and Europe. It [was] in America’s interest to cooperate with both.”6
When Putin opposed the Iraq war and U.S.-Russian