Tag Archives: Cold War

Russia’s Seattle Consulate Broken Into: the US Openly Flouts its International Obligations

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By Alex Gorka

Source: Strategic Culture Foundation

They did it again. On April 25, US inspectors broke into the Russian consulate in Seattle, which had been shuttered and vacated at the order of the American government, in a response to the Skripal case. The “inspection” was actually a break-in, since the locks had to be forced. The Russian staff had closed the mansion on April 24 but kept the keys, as the house is still the property of the Russian government. Officially, the Russian Federation (RF) still owns the mansion and its flag still flies from the roof, but the US owns the land and consular activities will no longer be authorized on that site.

The forced entry into the consulate was a flagrant violation of international law. True, the US government has the right to declare that the mission has been stripped of its diplomatic immunity. But it takes two to tango, and Russia never agreed to lift that immunity. That declaration has no validity without Russia’s consent.

The Vienna Convention on Diplomatic Relations of 1961 protects embassy and consulate property abroad by bestowing upon it the status of inviolability (Article 22). No unauthorized entry is allowed. Moreover, the host country is responsible for protecting all foreign missions from intrusions, damage, and similar events. Diplomatic sites cannot be searched. No document or property can be seized.

The 1963 Vienna Convention on Consular Relations states that consulates, along with their property, are always to be protected by their host, even during an armed conflict. No entrance without permission is allowed (Article 31).

According to the US-USSR Consular Convention of 1968, the diplomatic properties on each other’s soil are sacrosanct. The consulates enjoy diplomatic immunity. Like it or not, the US has just violated that document by entering the Seattle consulate.

As one can see, all the relevant international conventions state, by and large, the same thing – there is no entrance without permission. This is a hard-and-fast rule, but now all of these conventions have just been breached in broad daylight!

The question arises — what’s the use of signing agreements with someone who flouts them? Today they enter foreign compounds, tomorrow they unilaterally pull out of the Iran deal, and then what? The US can walk away from any major arms-control agreement, just like it abandoned the 1972 ABM Treaty in 2002. Washington signs agreements in order to force others to comply with them, while the US enjoys the freedom to interpret them at will. Nothing is binding upon that “shining city on a hill.”

The relevant domestic law in the US, the 1982 Foreign Missions Act, states that the secretary of state may demand that any foreign mission be stripped of its property if such a move is needed to protect US interests. This can be done provided that one year has passed from the date on which that foreign mission ceased its diplomatic or consular functions. In this case, one year has not passed. What’s more, no clear explanation is offered as to what exactly is meant by “US interests.” And in fact, this act is contradicted by international law. Why should a foreign mission comply with it, if all the conventions listed above are very explicit about property rights and the US is a party to all of them? Anyway, the US law is not relevant in this case, unlike the binding accords America has signed.

It is true that the two nations are engaged in an ongoing “diplomatic war.” That’s a process that’s easy to start and extremely difficult to end. It was not Moscow that started this folly. But even wars have their rules. The US actions are unprecedented and are doing serious damage to the country’s international image. The Seattle consulate’s closure has greatly complicated the lives of many people who have nothing to do with politics.

What about gains? There have been hardly any, especially taking into consideration that the US mission in St. Petersburg, which is going to be closed in response, is much more important for Americans than the consulate office in Seattle was for Russians. The expulsions and closures may go on until the ambassadors are the only ones left, but no one will win. “Tit-for-tat” expulsions are a game with no winners or losers. They are meaningless and doomed to ineffectuality

The ongoing Russian-US “diplomatic war” cannot continue forever. The day will inevitably come when Washington will have to reach some new agreements with Moscow about consulate offices. It’s highly likely that Russia will demand additional guarantees of the safety of its property on American soil. Other nations may follow suit.

Gross violations of international law inflict great damage. The US will not be trusted. It will be viewed as a state that can reject its commitments at any time it chooses. From now on, all nations will know that their embassies and consulates in the US are not protected by the international agreements the American government flouts so easily.

 

Russia and the War Party

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By Carl Boggs

Source: CounterPunch

The steady deterioration of American political discourse seems to have reached its lowest ebb in historical memory, visible in the rightward shift of both Democrats and Republicans.  One sign is the frenzied Democratic assault on Republicans from the right, especially in foreign policy.  Another is the resounding silence on the most crucial problems facing humanity: threat of catastrophic war, nuclear arms race, ecological crisis, health-care debacle, the worsening miseries of global capitalism.   Tabloid-style spectacles have increasingly filled media space.  Still another sign is the intensifying anti-Russia hysteria promoted by unhinged liberals in Congress and the corporate media, reminiscent of the worst McCarthyism.

Another example of this descent into absurdity is the book Russian Roulette, by liberals Michael Isikoff and David Corn – Beltway writers whose shrill anti-Russian crusade has received highest accolades by the New York Times and such promoters of the permanent warfare state as Rachel Maddow (whose gushing endorsement is on the back cover).  The subtitle – “The Inside Story of Putin’s War on America and the Election of Donald Trump” – reveals the political obsession of Democrats (and plenty of Republicans) for the past eighteen months, to the exclusion of most everything else.   More than anything, the volume illustrates the staggering level of ignorance in the U.S. about Russian history and politics, crude propaganda easily displacing coherent analysis.  (A more general – and devastating – review of Russian Routlette by Paul Street appeared earlier in CP.)

Russian Roulette is filled with 300 pages of meticulous detail – Trump’s (actual, planned, or failed) business dealings in Russia, endless goings and comings of shady characters and “operatives”, electronic transactions across the great divide, a litany of speeches, conferences, dinners and other activities, computer hacking and trolling schemes, breathless tales of lurid behavior, Russians clandestinely entering the U.S., reports on secret files, and of course the menacing specter of Russian “oligarchs”.  All this is believed to demonstrate Putin’s ruthless war against America, his supreme goal being to “destroy our democracy”, instill chaos, and neutralize U.S. as well as European geopolitical power.  As we have been ritually informed by CNN and kindred venues, cyber warfare (for now) is the Russians’ preeminent mode of combat – and it has been so devastatingly effective as to paralyze normal American politics.  It was cyber warfare, moreover, that delivered the 2016 presidential election to the Russia-loving Trump.

Trump, it turns out, was guilty of the most grievous sin: he went so far as to mention the possibility of cooperative relations with Russia, the idea being to help fight terrorism and better manage the nuclear threat. His other crime was to question the neocon/Democratic/Clintonite agenda of regime change in Syria – an agenda (still alive) that could bring military confrontation with a nuclear state. Trump’s fanciful hope meant that he had to be a willing “stooge” of Putin and his nefarious plots.

It turns out that the myriad claims, charges, and allegations set forth by Isikoff and Corn amount to little of substance – surely nothing to prove that Putin has been conducting warfare against the U.S., or that Russians had decisively influenced the 2016 presidential election.  Evidence that Trump conspired in any way with Putin or his imagined assemblage of henchmen, former KGB agents, cyberwarriors, and oligarchs is similarly lacking.   Yet, for the authors the only way Hillary Clinton could have lost the presidency that was rightfully hers was because the Russians intervened, with help from the treacherous Wikileaks, the authors writing: “Never before had a president’s election been so closely linked to the intervention of a foreign power.”

According to Isikoff and Corn, the scheming Russians managed to infiltrate party machinery, elections, and the Internet, deploying squads of cyberwarriors from the notorious Internet Research Agency and other sites.  They also placed ads in Facebook and other social-media sites.  How many American voters were even exposed to such fare, much less swayed by it, cannot be established, but vague popular awareness of this Russian skullduggery did not appear until the Mueller investigation called attention to it more than a year after the election.  No one denies the actuality of Russian trolling and hacking enterprises. The problem for the authors here is that such operations are so universally practiced as to be rather commonplace, while it has yet to be shown they can alter election outcomes in the U.S.. Moreover, in this area of intelligence work (as in so many others) the U.S. has long been unchallenged world champion.

The authors describe Putin as an “autocratic, repressive, and dangerous Russian leader” who routinely kills his political enemies and crushes dissent.  Such oversimplified descriptions of Putin and the Russian scene in general are set forth as established truths, no discussion or evidence needed.  Why a duly-elected leader (with 76 percent of the vote earlier this year) can be so ritually dismissed as a ruthless tyrant Isikoff and Corn never get around to explaining.  Were election irregularities or illegalities reported?   Were voters threatened or coerced?   Is Putin any more authoritarian than the vast majority of leaders around the world?  Would Netanyahu in Israel, Macron in France, or Merkel in Germany (all elected by much slimmer margins) be described as simple despots?

As for Trump, Russian Roulette seeks to demonstrate that the candidate and then president somehow “aided and abetted Moscow’s attack on American democracy.” That’s right: the White House served as a willing, secret accomplice in Putin’s criminal schemes.  So many Trump associates –Paul Manafort, General Michael Flynn, Carter Page, et. al. – had indeed previously traveled to Russia, talked and dined with Russians, and (gasp) seemed to want something of a cordial relationship with business and other interests there.  (Why this should have been shocking is hard to fathom, since in 2016 and 2017 the Russian Federation was still an integral part of the global capitalist economy and the U.S. has been doing plenty of business there since the early 1990s.)

The authors’ unfounded generalizations are based mainly on three sources, most crucially the all-important (but phony) Christopher Steele “dossier” that was said to implicate Trump in a variety of offenses and scandals that even Isikoff and Corn admit is comprised of “sensational and uncorroborated claims” – that is, fake news.  They argue, further, that Putin hacked DNC communications and passed along damning emails to Wikileaks, but investigation (by William Binney and others) suggests they were more likelyleaked than hacked; Julian Assange firmly denies that the files (never viewed by the FBI) came from any state actor.  The establishment media paid little attention to the damning content of these emails, so their impact on the election in any case could not have amounted to much.  Even the Mueller Committee report earlier this year, which indicted 13 Russian trolls and hackers, conceded they had no appreciable impact on the 2016 election results.

In Russian Roulette the authors seem infatuated with the American “intelligence community” – purported last word on the question of Russian interference — writing confidently but misleadingly: “The intelligence community has identified Moscow as the culprit in the hacks of Democrats in October [2016].”  One cannot help wondering what sort of “community” Isikoff and Corn have in mind.

By “intelligence community” do they include the NSA, an agency that has been spying on Americans and the world with impunity for years while a spokesperson (James Clapper) lied about it before Congress?  Could they be referring to the CIA, active for decades in clandestine and illegal operations such as unwarranted surveillance, sabotage, torture, drone strikes on civilians, and regime change (by military force, not just computer meddling) in Vietnam, Iran, Guatemala, Chile, Yugoslavia, Iraq, Libya, Ukraine, and too many other countries to list here, all aided and abetted by flagrant lies and cover-ups?  Perhaps they have in mind the FBI, an agency long dedicated to destroying popular movements (Civil Rights, anti-war, etc.) through COINTELPRO and other illegal operations.  Or the DEA (Drug Enforcement Administration), which for decades has squandered hundreds of billions of dollars on a futile but disastrous and racist War on Drugs, filling jails with people targeted, harassed, jailed, and ruined for the crime of using banned substances?

Can Isikoff and Corn actually take seriously the murky claims of the most Orwellian surveillance apparatus in history?  Do they believe that this “community” is subject to any meaningful oversight and accountability?  Their remarkably clueless account – basic to virtually every narrative in Russian Roulette – reveals an astonishing disconnect from postwar American (and world) history.

The central Isikoff/Corn thesis is not only devoid of factual support but is totally inverted: the present state of affairs is exactly the opposite of what they argue.  There has been no “Putin’s war on America”, but rather sustained U.S. (and NATO) warfare against Russia – political, economic, ideological, military – since 2000, if not earlier.  The Russians occupy the other, targetedend of the power spectrum, obvious to any serious observer.  Who has invoked harsh and repeated economic sanctions on whom?  Who has militarily encircled and targeted whom?  Who has deployed nuclear weapons at whose border?  Who has financed and orchestrated a hostile coup adjacent to whose territory?  Who has carried out non-stop ideological hysteria against whom?

In the world as it now exists, it is worth asking whether Russia could plausibly assume the role of imperial aggressor in its dealings with the world’s leading superpower?   Consider that in 2017 the total Russian GDP as barely 1.5 trillion dollars, roughly one-twelfth that of the U.S. ($19.5 trillion) and not even one-tenth that of the European Union ($14 trillion).  Military spending breaks down accordingly: nearly one trillion for the U.S. and $250 billion for NATO compared to $61 billion for Russia.  As for intelligence operations, the imbalance worsens – a budget of six billion dollars for the FSB and military GRU combined, compared to $75 billion for Washington not counting another $45 billion for the DEA and DHS (Department of Homeland Security) in tandem.

In fact Russia, despite its nuclear prowess, does not have the leverage and resources to threaten American (much less broader Western) geopolitical objectives – the real “threat” coming from the stubborn fact of Russian independence that was squelched during the Clintonite 1990s, when Washington used its power to reduce post-Soviet Russia to puppet status under Boris Yeltsin.   During the Yeltsin period the U.S. was never content with simple “meddling” in Russian affairs: it propped up a weak president, dismantled the public infrastructure, coddled an emergent stratum of oligarchs, and then spent $2.5 billion to sway the 1996 election in favor of a weak and unpopular Yeltsin.  Only with Putin’s emergence in 1999 did the nation regain a semblance of independence, restoring economic and political sovereignty, much to the disgust of Western ruling interests.

American intrusion into domestic Russian affairs is never explored by Isikoff and Corn, as it would undermine their one-sided tract. Nor do the authors have much to say about the post-Soviet eastward march of NATO, which allowed the U.S. and its allies to partially encircle Russia with both nuclear and conventional forces. The opening salvo of this strangulation gambit was President Bill Clinton’s “humanitarian” war against Serbia ending with the 1999 U.S./NATO bombings.   This was followed by President George W. Bush’s decision to scrap the crucial ABM Treaty with Russia in 2002 before invading Iraq in 2003.  CIA and State Department efforts to orchestrate regime change in Ukraine, ultimately achieved in 2014, came soon thereafter.

The ongoing Western campaign of economic warfare, media propaganda, and military provocations directed at Russia has only served to bolster Putin’s legitimacy, as shown by his overwhelming support in the 2018 election.  Yet Isikoff and Corn can write: “He [Putin] was a Russian nationalist to the core.  He wanted to extend Russian power. . . [as] an autocrat in the long tradition of Russian strongmen and had little interest in joining the club of Western liberal democracies – or winning its approval.”  Given the rampant imperial behavior of Washington and its European partners, Putin would have to be certifiably insane to respond in a manner that would permit further Western encroachments.

It is the expansionist U.S./NATO alliance that has maliciously targeted Russia, not the other way around.  Putin is surely a nationalist, but why not?  That just means he will fight for Russian national integrity against Western efforts to isolate and destabilize the country.  Any cyberwarfare activities launched by the Russians will appear to the rational observer as quite intelligible, a proven method to gain information about the plans of a vastly superior adversary overflowing with anti-Russia venom.

Like other Russia-bashing ideologues, Isikoff and Corn see terrible “oligarchs” everywhere, all naturally cozy with Putin. We have references to “Putin and his oligarch friends,” as if large-scale business interests could somehow have nothing to do with government.  They note that payments to IRA trolls “were being made through a holding company owned by Yevgeny Prigozhin, a Russian oligarch and restaurateur close to the Russian president and known as ‘Putin’s chef”.”  Along with this disturbing revelation we are told that a “clique of [oligarchic] hardliners was able to outgun Russian moderates – a group including Yury Kovalchuk, billionaire owner of Rossiya bank and friend of the president “known as Putin’s banker”.  It would be a mistake to overlook the infamous Aras Agalarov, a real-estate mogul identified as “Putin;s Builder”.  Left out was any reference to “Putin’s Gardener”.

The authors deftly uncover a clique of diabolical oligarchs colluding with Putin to launch attacks on the West.  It might be useful to clarify the meaning of “oligarch”. One generally held definition is that they are exceedingly wealthy and powerful business and financial elites – the same interests that Washington zealously supported in Russia during the 1990s. These would be aligned with the very corporate and banking interests that dominate the global capitalist system, everywhere seeming to enjoy close relations with their governments.  American oligarchs (multibillionaires) in fact far outnumber their Russian counterparts – 565 to 96 – and possess many times the wealth and influence.  Further, if Washington really despises oligarchs, why did it install billionaire Petro Poroshenko as Ukraine ruler after the 2014 coup?

For Isikoff and Corn, Hillary Clinton might have been a terribly flawed candidate, but her loss nonetheless would not have occurred in the absence of “Putin’s underhanded intervention”.  No one questions whether Russian trolls and hackers were active in 2016 – or that Facebook ads were placed – but no evidence of their actual effectiveness has been presented, much less their capacity to determine an election outcome.

As they righteously celebrate the virtues of multiculturalism, diversity, and tolerance, liberal Democrats – now more than ever a neocon party of war – have come to embrace just the opposite: fierce hostility against other nations and cultures, smug provincialism, a recycled McCarthyism that spews hatred at even the slightest dissent from super-patriotic orthodoxy.  They pretend victim status when they are the ones targeting, attacking, smearing, and warmongering.

Worse yet, to satisfy their narrow political agendas they are perfectly ready to risk military confrontation with a nuclear power – a conflict that could lead to unprecedented global catastrophe.  Nowhere in this parochial text do the authors express the slightest concern for the horrors that might result from years of U.S./European hostility toward Russia.  Despite an unlevel economic and political playing-field, it is worth remembering that in nuclear matters Russia has rough parity with the West.  This might deter the neocons of both parties or it might not, the sad reality being is that liberal Democrats exemplified by Isikoff and Corn have little to offer the world beyond continuous war shrouded in a flimsy, desperate identity politics.

 

Carl Boggs is the author of The Hollywood War Machine, with Tom Pollard (second edition, forthcoming), and Drugs, Power, and Politics, both published by Paradigm.     

 

NYT: Don’t Be Progressive, Be a ‘Liberal’

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By Jim Naureckas

Source: FAIR

A New York Times op-ed by political scientist (and former Bob Kerrey aide) Greg Weiner (7/13/18) may well be the New York Times–iest op-ed ever.

Its ostensible subject is why Democrats should call themselves “liberals” and not “progressives.” But in making that case, it hits most of the main points of the New York Times‘ ideology—one that has guided the paper since the late 19th century.

First and foremost, it’s a defense of the status quo. “The basic premise of liberal politics,” Weiner writes, “is the capacity of government to do good, especially in ameliorating economic ills.” But not too much good, mind you:  “A liberal can believe that government can do more good or less,” he stresses. Weiner draws a contrast with progressives: “Where liberalism seeks to ameliorate economic ills, progressivism’s goal is to eradicate them.”

So Lyndon Johnson’s Great Society is cited negatively as an example of “a progressive effort to remake society by eradicating poverty’s causes”—in the process supporting  “community action” and  financing the “political activism”—presented without explanation as a self-evident evil.  The explanation, presumably, is that the poor should remain passive as they remain poor, gratefully accepting the handouts that “alleviate” their plight, as “cutting checks,” as Weiner puts it, is “something government does competently.”

Coupled with this anxiety about “eradicating poverty’s causes” is the confident assurance that the truth is always somewhere in the middle. “Unlike liberalism, progressivism is intrinsically opposed to conservation,” Weiner warns:

Nothing structurally impedes compromise between conservatives, who hold that the accumulated wisdom of tradition is a better guide than the hypercharged rationality of the present, and liberals, because both philosophies exist on a spectrum.

Conservatives make better partners for liberals than progressives, because “one can debate how much to conserve.” But you can’t debate how much to progress, apparently: “Progressivism is inherently hostile to moderation because progress is an unmitigated good.”

In other words: Equality and justice, sure, but let’s not rush into things, is the “liberal’s” advice. He endorses “policies [that] develop gradually and command wide consensus—at least under normal circumstances.” (Progressives have an unnerving desire to “depress the accelerator.”)

Something that doesn’t change is the right wing of the left’s attraction to redbaiting. Weiner praises “the Cold War liberal who stood for social amelioration and against Soviet Communism,” a figure who “was often maligned by progressives.” Without coming out and accusing progressives of Stalinism, he describes progressives’ response to critics as “a passive-aggressive form of re-education,” one that “supersedes the rights of its opponents.” The example he gives of this is the “progressive indifference to the rights of those who oppose progressive policies in areas like sexual liberation”—an odd arena to cite, since the main “rights” that opponents of “sexual liberation” have demanded in recent years are the “right” of small businesses to discriminate against gay customers and the “right” to check the chromosome status of people who use public restrooms.

 

You can send a message to the New York Times at letters@nytimes.com  (Twitter:@NYTimes). Please remember that respectful communication is the most effective.

The Art of War: The Western American Empire in Crisis

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By Manlio Dinucci

Source: Global Research

The US tariff war against China and the new sanctions against Russia are signs of a trend that goes beyond current events.

To understand what it is, we should go back about thirty years ago. In 1991 the United States, winners of the Cold War and of the first war after the Cold War, waged in the Gulf, declared that “the United States remains the only state with truly global strength, reach and influence in every dimension – political, economic and military” and that “there is no substitute for American leadership ” in the world.

By relying on the dollar hegemony, on the global reach of its multinationals and its financial groups, on the control of international organizations (IMF, World Bank, WTO), the United States promotes “free trade” and “Free movement of capital” on a global scale, reducing or eliminating tariffs and rules. The other Western powers move in their wake.

The Russian Federation, in a profound crisis after the disintegration of the USSR, is considered by Washington as an easy land of conquest, to be dismembered to better control its great resources.  China, open to the market economy, also appears to be conquerable with US capital and products and exploitable as a large reservoir of low-cost labor.

Thirty years later, the “American dream” of the unchallenged domination of the world has vanished.

Russia, by putting up an internal front to defend national sovereignty, has overcome the crisis and regained the status of great power.

China, “the world’s factory” where also US multinationals produce, has become the world’s leading exporter of goods and makes increasing foreign investments. Today it challenges the technological supremacy of the United States.

The project of a new Silk Road – a road, rail and maritime network between China and Europe through 60 countries – places China at the forefront of the process of globalization, while the United States is perched erecting economic barriers.

Washington looks with growing concern at the economic and political partnership between Russia and China, which challenges the hegemony of the dollar.

Failing to oppose this process only through economic instruments, the United States resorts to the military ones. The putsch in Ukraine and the subsequent nuclear escalation in Europe, the strategic shift to Asia, the wars in Afghanistan and Syria, are part of the strategy with which the US and the other Western powers try to maintain the unipolar dominance in a world that is becoming multipolar.

However, this strategy is suffering a series of setbacks. Russia and China, under increasing military pressure, reacted by strengthening their strategic cooperation.

Russia has not been got on the ropes but, in a surprise move, intervened militarily in support of the Syrian State which, in the US / NATO plans, should have ended up like the Libyan State. In Afghanistan, US and NATO are mired in a war that has been going on for over 17 years.

As a reaction to these failures, the propaganda campaign is intensified to make Russia appear as a dangerous enemy, also using the false flag of chemical attacks in England and Syria.

The same technique was used in 2003 when, to justify the war against Iraq, Secretary of State Colin Powell presented to the UN the “evidence” that Iraq possessed weapons of mass destruction. Powell, in 2016, had to admit the non-existence of such weapons. In 15 years, however, the war has caused over a million deaths.

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Why the West cannot stomach Russians

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By Andre Vltchek

Source: New Eastern Outlook

When it comes to Russia or the Soviet Union, reports and historical accounts do get blurry; in the West they do, and consequently in all of its ‘client states’.

Fairy tales get intermingled with reality, while fabrications are masterfully injected into the subconsciousness of billions of people worldwide. Russia is an enormous country, in fact, the largest country on Earth in terms of territory. It is scarcely inhabited. It is deep, and as a classic once wrote: “It is impossible to understand Russia with one’s brain. One could only believe in it.”

The Western mind generally doesn’t like things unknown, spiritual and complex. Since the ‘old days’, especially since the crusades and monstrous colonialist expeditions to all corners of the world, the Westerners were told fables about their own “noble deeds” performed in the plundered lands. Everything had to be clear and simple: “Virtuous Europeans were civilizing savages and spreading Christianity, therefore, in fact, saving those dark poor primitive souls.”

Of course, tens of millions were dying in the process, while further tens of millions were shackled and brought to the “New Worlds” as slaves. Gold, silver, and other loot, as well as slave labor had been (and still are) paying for all those European palaces, railroads, universities and theatres, but that did not matter, as the bloodshed was most of the time something abstract and far away from those over-sensitive eyes of the Western public.

Westerners like simplicity, particularly when it comes to moral definitions of “good and evil”. It matters nothing if the truth gets systematically ‘massaged’, or even if the reality is fully fabricated. What matters is that there is no deep guilt and no soul-searching. Western rulers and their opinion makers know their people – their ‘subjects’ – perfectly well, and most of the time, they give them what they are asking for. The rulers and the reigned are generally living in symbiosis. They keep bitching about each other, but mostly they have similar goals: to live well, to live extremely well, as long as the others are forced to pay for it; with their riches, with their labor and often with their blood.

Culturally, most of the citizens of Europe and North America hate to pay the bill for their high life; they even detest to admit that their life is extremely ‘high’. They like to feel like victims. They like to feel that they are ‘used’. They like to imagine that they are sacrificing themselves for the rest of the world.

And, above all, they hate real victims: those they have been murdering, raping, plundering and insulting, for decades and centuries.

Recent ‘refugee crises’ showed the spite Europeans feel for their prey. People who made them rich and who lost everything in the process are humiliated, despised and insulted. Be they Afghans or Africans, the Middle Easterners or South Asians. Or Russians, although Russians are falling to its own, unique category.

*****

Many Russians look white. Most of them eat with knife and fork, they drink alcohol, excel at Western classical music, poetry, literature, science and philosophy.

To Western eyes they look ‘normal’, but actually, they are not.

Russians always want ‘something else’; they refuse to play by Western rules.

They are stubbornly demanding to remain different, and to be left alone.

When confronted, when attacked, they fight.

They rarely strike first, almost never invade.

But when threatened, when assaulted, they fight with tremendous determination and force, and they never lose. Villages and cities get converted into invader’s graves. Millions die while defending their Motherland, but the country survives. And it happens again and again and again, as the Western hordes have been, for centuries, assaulting and burning Russian lands, never learning the lesson and never giving up on their sinister dream of conquering and controlling that proud and determined colossus.

In the West, they don’t like those who defend themselves, who fight against them, and especially those who win.

*****

It gets much worse than that.

Russia has this terrible habit… not only does it defend itself and its people, but it also fights for the others, protecting colonized and pillaged nations, as well as those that are unjustly assaulted.

It saved the world from Nazism. It did it at a horrific price of 25 million men, women and children, but it did it; courageously, proudly and altruistically. The West never forgave the Soviet Union for this epic victory either, because all that is unselfish and self-sacrificing, is always in direct conflict with its own principles, and therefore ‘extremely dangerous’.

The Russian people had risen; had fought and won in the 1917 Revolution; an event which terrified the West more than anything else in history, as it had attempted to create a fully egalitarian, classless and racially color-blind society. It also gave birth to Internationalism, an occurrence that I recently described in my book The Great October Socialist Revolution: Impact on the World and the Birth of Internationalism.

Soviet Internationalism, right after the victory in WWII, helped greatly, directly and indirectly, dozens of countries on all continents, to stand up and to confront the European colonialism and the North American imperialism. The West, and especially Europe, never forgave the Soviet people in general and Russians in particular, for helping to liberate its slaves.

That is when the greatest wave of propaganda in human history really began to roll. From London to New York, from Paris to Toronto, an elaborate web of anti-Soviet and covertly anti-Russian hysteria was unleashed with monstrously destructive force. Tens of thousands of ‘journalists’, intelligence officers, psychologists, historians, as well as academics, were employed. Nothing Soviet, nothing Russian (except those glorified and often ‘manufactured’ Russian dissidents) was spared.

The excesses of the Great October Socialist Revolution and the pre-WWII era were systematically fabricated, exaggerated, and then engraved into the Western history textbooks and mass media narrative. In those tales, there was nothing about the vicious invasions and attacks coming from the West, aimed at destroying the young Bolshevik state. Naturally, there was no space for mentioning the British, French, U.S., Czech, Polish, Japanese, German and others’ monstrous cruelties.

Soviet and Russian views were hardly ever allowed to penetrate the monolithic and one-sided Western propaganda narrative.

Like obedient sheep, the Western public accepted the disinformation it was fed with. Eventually, many people living in the Western colonies and ‘client states’, did the same. A great number of colonized people were taught how to blame themselves for their misery.

The most absurd but somehow logical occurrence then took place: many men, women and even children living in the USSR, succumbed to Western propaganda. Instead of trying to reform their imperfect but still greatly progressive country, they gave up, became cynical, aggressively ‘disillusioned’, corrupt and naively but staunchly pro-Western.

*****

It was the first and most likely the last time in the history, Russia got defeated by the West. It happened through deceit, through shameless lies, through Western propaganda.

What followed could be easily described as genocide.

The Soviet Union was first lulled into Afghanistan, then it was mortally injured by the war there, by an arms race with the United States, and by the final stage of propaganda that was literally flowing like lava from various hostile Western state-sponsored radio stations. Of course, local ‘dissidents’ also played an important role.

Under Gorbachev, a ‘useful idiot’ of the West, things got extremely bizarre. I don’t believe that he was paid to ruin his own country, but he did almost everything to run it into the ground; precisely what Washington wanted him to do. Then, in front of the entire world, a mighty and proud Union of the Soviet Socialist Republics suddenly shook in agony, then uttered a loud cry, and collapsed; died painfully but swiftly.

A new turbo-capitalist, bandit, pro-oligarch and confusedly pro-Western Russia was born. Russia which was governed by an alcoholic Boris Yeltsin; a man loved and supported by Washington, London and other Western centers of power.

It was a totally unnatural, sick Russia – cynical and compassionless, built with someone else’s ideas – Russia of Radio Liberty and Voice of America, of the BBC, of black marketers, of oligarchs and multi-national corporations.

Is the West now daring to say that Russians are ‘interfering’ in something in Washington? Are they out of their minds?

Washington and other Western capitals did not only ‘interfere’, they openly broke the Soviet Union into pieces and then they began kicking Russia which was at that point half-alive. Is it all forgotten, or is Western public again fully ‘unaware’ of what took place during those dark days?

The West kept spitting at the impoverished and injured country, refused to honor international agreements and treaties. It offered no help. Multi-nationals were unleashed, and began ‘privatizing’ Russian state companies, basically stealing what was built by the sweat and blood of Soviet workers, during long decades.

Interference? Let me repeat: it was direct intervention, invasion, a grab of resources, shameless theft! I want to read and write about it, but we don’t hear much about it, anymore, do we?

Now we are told that Russia is paranoid, that its President is paranoid! With straight face, the West is lying; pretending that it has not been trying to murder Russia.

Those years… Those pro-Western years when Russia became a semi-client state of the West, or call it a semi-colony! There was no mercy, no compassion coming from abroad. Many of those idiots – kitchen intellectuals from Moscow and provinces – suddenly woke up but it was too late. Many of them had suddenly nothing to eat. They got what they were told to ask for: their Western ‘freedom and democracy’, and Western-style capitalism or in summary: total collapse.

I remember well how it was ‘then’. I began returning to Russia, horrified, working in Moscow, Tomsk, Novosibirsk, Leningrad. Academics from Akadem Gorodok outside Novosibirsk were selling their libraries in the bitter cold, in dark metro underpasses of Novosibirsk… Runs on the banks… Old retired people dying from hunger and cold behind massive doors of concrete blocks… unpaid salaries and starving miners, teachers…

Russia under the deadly embrace of the West, for the first and hopefully last time! Russia whose life expectancy suddenly dropped to African Sub-Saharan levels. Russia humiliated, wild, in terrible pain.

*****

But that nightmare did not last long.

And what happened – those short but horrible years under both Gorbachev and Yeltsin, but above all under the Western diktat – will never be forgotten, not forgiven.

Russians know perfectly well what they do not want, anymore!

Russia stood up again. Huge, indignant and determined to live its own life, its own way. From an impoverished, humiliated and robbed nation, subservient to the West, the country evolved and within a few years, the free and independent Russia once again joined ranks of the most developed and powerful countries on Earth.

And as before Gorbachev, Russia is once again able to help those nations which are under unjust and vicious attacks of the Western empire.

A man who is leading this renaissance, President Vladimir Putin, is tough, but Russia is under great threat and so is the world – this is no time for weaklings.

President Putin is not perfect (who is, really?), but he is a true patriot, and I dare say, an internationalist.

Now the West, once again, hates both Russia and its leader. No wonder; undefeated, strong and free Russia is the worst imaginable foe of Washington and its lieutenants.

That’s how the West feels, not Russia. Despite all that was done to it, despite tens of millions of lost and ruined lives, Russia has always been ready to compromise, even to forgive, if not forget.

*****

There is something deeply pathological in the psyche of the West. It cannot accept anything less than full and unconditional submission. It has to control, to be in charge, and on top of everything; it has to feel exceptional. Even when it murders and ruins the entire Planet, it insists on feeling superior to the rest of the world.

This faith in exceptionalism is the true Western religion, much more than even Christianity, which for decades has not really played any important role there. Exceptionalism is fanatical, it is fundamentalist and unquestionable.

It also insists that its narrative is the only one available anywhere in the World. That the West is seen as a moral leader, as a beacon of progress, as the only competent judge and guru.

Lies are piling on top of lies. As in all religions, the more absurd the pseudo-reality is, the more brutal and extreme are the methods used to uphold it. The more laughable the fabrications are, the more powerful the techniques used to suppress the truth are.

Today, hundreds of thousands of ‘academics’, teachers, journalists, artists, psychologists and other highly paid professionals, in all parts of the world, are employed by the Empire, for two goals only – to glorify the Western narrative and to discredit all that is standing in its way; daring to challenge it.

Russia is the most hated adversary of the West, with China, Russia’s close ally being near second.

The propaganda war unleashed by the West is so insane, so intense, that even some of the European and North American citizens are beginning to question tales coming from Washington, London and elsewhere.

Wherever one turns, there is a tremendous medley of lies, of semi-lies, half-truths; a complex and unnavigable swamp of conspiracy theories. Russia is being attacked for interfering in U.S. domestic affairs, for defending Syria, for standing by defenseless and intimidated nations, for having its own powerful media, for doping its athletes, for still being Communist, for not being socialist anymore; in brief: for everything imaginable and unimaginable.

Criticism of the country is so thorough and ludicrous, that one begins to ask very legitimate questions: “what about the past? What about the Western narrative regarding the Soviet past, particularly the post-Revolutionary period, and the period between two world wars?”

The more I analyze this present-day Western anti-Russian and anti-Chinese propaganda, the more determined I am to study and write about the Western narrative regarding Soviet history. I’m definitely planning to investigate these matters in the future, together with my friends – Russian and Ukrainian historians.

*****

In the eyes of the West, Russians are ‘traitors’.

Instead of joining the looters, they have been standing by the ‘wretched of the world’, in the past, as well as now. They refused to sell their Motherland, and to enslave their own people. Their government is doing all it can to make Russia self-sufficient, fully independent, prosperous, proud and free.

Remember that ‘freedom’, ‘democracy’ and many other terms, mean totally different things in distinctive parts of the world. What is happening in the West could never be described as ‘freedom’ in Russia or in China, and vice versa.

Frustrated, collapsing, atomized and egotistic societies of Europe and North America do not inspire even their own people anymore. They are escaping by millions annually, to Asia, Latin America, and even to Africa. Escaping from emptiness, meaninglessness and emotional cold. But it is not Russia’s or China’s business to tell them how to live or not to live!

In the meantime, great cultures like Russia and China do not need, and do not want, to be told by the Westerners, what freedom is, and what democracy is.

They do not attack the West, and expect the same in return.

It is truly embarrassing that the countries responsible for hundreds of genocides, for hundreds of millions of murdered people on all continents, still dare to lecture others.

Many victims are too scared to speak.

Russia is not.

It is composed, gracious, but fully determined to defend itself if necessary; itself as well as many other human beings living on this beautiful but deeply scarred Planet.

Russian culture is enormous: from poetry and literature, to music, ballet, philosophy… Russian hearts are soft, they easily melt when approached with love and kindness. But when millions of lives of innocent people are threatened, both the hearts and muscles of Russians quickly turn to stone and steel. During such moments, when only victory could save the world, Russian fists are hard, and the same is true about the Russian armor.

There is no match to Russian courage in the sadistic but cowardly West.

Irreversibly, both hope and future are moving towards the east.

And that is why Russia is desperately hated by the West.

Mass Deception and the Prelude to World War

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By Colin Todhunter

Source: Defend Democracy Press

In Libya, NATO bombed a path to Tripoli to help its proxy forces on the ground oust Gaddafi. Tens of thousands lost their lives and that country’s social fabric and infrastructure now lies in ruins. Gaddafi was murdered and his plans to assert African independence and undermine Western (not least French) hegemony on that continent have been rendered obsolete.

In Syria, the US, Turkey, France, Britain, Saudi Arabia and Qatar have been helping to arm militants. The Daily Telegraph’s March 2013 article “US and Europe in ‘major airlift of arms to Syrian rebels through Zagreb’” reported that 3,000 tons of weapons dating back to the former Yugoslavia had been sent in 75 planeloads from Zagreb airport to the rebels. The New York Times March 2013 article “Arms Airlift to Syria Rebels Expands, With CIA Aid” stated that Arab governments and Turkey had sharply increased their military aid to Syria’s opposition fighters. This aid included more than 160 military cargo flights.

Sold under the notion of a spontaneous democratic uprising against a tyrannical political leader, Syria is little more than an illegal war for capital, empire and energy. The West and its allies have been instrumental in organising the war as elaborated by Tim Anderson in his book ‘The Dirty War on Syria’.

Over the last 15 years or so, politicians and the media have been manipulating popular sentiment to get an increasingly war-fatigued Western public to support ongoing wars under the notion of protecting civilians or a bogus ‘war on terror’. They spin a yarn about securing women’s rights or a war on terror in Afghanistan, removing despots from power in Iraq, Libya or Syria or protecting human life, while then going on to attack or help destabilise countries, resulting in the loss of hundreds of thousands of civilian lives.

Emotive language designed to instill fear about potential terror attacks in Europe or myths about humanitarianism intervention are used as a pretext to wage imperialist wars in mineral-rich countries and geostrategically important regions.

Part of the battle for the public’s hearts and minds is to keep people confused. They must be convinced to regard these wars and conflicts as a disconnected array of events and not as the planned machinations of empire. The ongoing disinformation narrative about Russian aggression is part of the strategy. Ultimately, Russia (and China) is the real and increasingly imminent target: Moscow has stood in the way of the West’s plans in Syria and both Russia and China are undermining the role of the dollar in international trade, a lynchpin of US power.

The countries of the West are effectively heading for war with Russia but relatively few among the public seem to know or even care. Many are oblivious to the slaughter that has already been inflicted on populations with the help of their taxes and governments in far-away lands. With the reckless neoconservative warmonger John Bolton now part of the Trump administration, it seems we could be hurtling towards major war much faster than previously thought.

Most of the public remains blissfully ignorant of the psy-ops being directed at them through the corporate media. Given recent events in the UK and the ramping up of anti-Russia rhetoric, if ordinary members of the public think that Theresa May or Boris Johnson ultimately have their best interests at heart, they should think again. The major transnational corporations based on Wall Street and in the City of London are the ones setting Anglo-US policy agendas often via the Brookings Institute, Council on Foreign Relations, International Crisis Group, Chatham House, etc.

The owners of these companies, the capitalist class, have off-shored millions of jobs as well as their personal and company tax liabilities to boost their profits and have bankrupted economies. We see the results in terms of austerity, unemployment, powerlessness, privatization, deregulation, banker control of economies, corporate control of food and seeds, the stripping away of civil liberties, increased mass surveillance and wars to grab mineral resources and ensure US dollar hegemony. These are the interests the politicians serve.

It’s the ability to maximise profit by shifting capital around the world that matters to this class, whether on the back of distorted free trade agreements, which open the gates for plunder, or through coercion and militarism, which merely tear them down.

Whether it is the structural violence of neoliberal economic policies or actual military violence, the welfare of ordinary folk around the world does not enter the equation. In an imposed oil-thirsty, war-driven system of globalised capitalism and over-consumption that is wholly unnecessary and is stripping the planet bare, the bottom line is that ordinary folk – whether workers in the West, farmers in India or civilians displaced en masse in war zones like Syria – must be bent according to the will of Western capital.

We should not be fooled by made-for-media outpourings of morality about good and evil that are designed to create fear, outrage and support for more militarism and resource-grab wars. The shaping of public opinion is a multi-million-dollar industry.

Take for instance the mass harvesting of Facebook data by Cambridge Analytica to shape the outcomes of the US election and the Brexit campaign. According to journalist Liam O’Hare, its parent company Strategic Communications Laboratories (SCL) has conducted ‘behavioural change’ programmes in over 60 countries and its clients have included the British Military of Defence, the US State Department and NATO. According to O’Hare, the use of the media to fool the public is one of SCL’s key selling points.

Among its activities in Europe have been campaigns targeting Russia. The company has “sweeping links” with Anglo-American political and military interests. In the UK, the interests of the governing Conservative Party and military-intelligence players are brought together via SCL: board members include “an array of Lords, Tory donors, ex-British army officers and defense contractors.”

O’Hare says it is clear is that all SCL’s activities have been inextricably linked to its Cambridge Analytica arm. He states:

“International deception and meddling is the name of the game for SCL. We finally have the most concrete evidence yet of shadowy actors using dirty tricks in order to rig elections. But these operators aren’t operating from Moscow… they are British, Eton educated, headquartered in the City of London and have close ties to Her Majesty’s government”

So, what are we to make of the current anti-Russia propaganda we witness regarding the nerve agent incident in Salisbury and the failure of the British government to provide evidence to demonstrate Russian culpability? The relentless accusations by Theresa May and Boris Johnson that have been parroted across the corporate media in the West indicate that the manipulation of public perception is everything and facts count for little. It is alarming given what is at stake – the escalation of conflict between the West and a major nuclear power.

Welcome to the world of mass deception à la Edward Bernays and Josef Goebbels.

US social commentator Walter Lippmann once said that ‘responsible men’ make decisions and have to be protected from the ‘bewildered herd’ – the public. He added that the public should be subdued, obedient and distracted from what is really happening. Screaming patriotic slogans and fearing for their lives, they should be admiring with awe leaders who save them from destruction.

Although the West’s political leaders are manipulating, subduing and distracting the public in true Lippmannesque style, they aren’t ‘saving’ anyone from anything: their reckless actions towards Russia could lead towards a war that could wipe out all life on the planet.

 

* Colin Todhunter is a frequent contributor to Global Research and Asia-Pacific Research.

The Skripal Poisonings and the Ongoing Vilification of Putin

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By Gary Leupp

Source: CounterPunch

Sergei Skripal and his daughter were poisoned by a nerve agent on March 4 on a park bench in Salisbury, England.

Skripal had been a Russian double agent, a spy who turned over 300 names of Russian spies to British intelligence from 1995 to 2004. He was (not so surprisingly) arrested in Russia in 2004 and sentenced to thirteen years in prison. He was released in a spy-swap in 2010, settled in the UK and became a British citizen.

I see no reason to judge his moral character, although some might reflect that in Kantian general terms what he did was rather bad. (In precisely the same sense that it would be bad for a British citizen to become a double agent for Russia.) Double agents are often punished harshly; this is the way of the world.

Skripal posed no further threat to the Russian state. There is at least one report that he sought to return to Russia recently. It’s hard to comprehend why at this time Moscow would poison him and his young daughter visiting from Russia with a nerve agent (Novichok) created in the USSR from the 1970s but subsequently banned and destroyed under international supervision. Cui bono? Who profits from these poisonings?

In all the outrage, expressed in Britain and elsewhere, about this attack, there is precious little analysis. The Russian foreign minister Sergey Lavrov has said, “This is nonsense. This has nothing to do with us.” The group of military-grade nerve agents called Novichok have been described in academic literature such that many different actors could produce Novichok. The Russians say they have long since destroyed their stocks and suggest the Czech Republic could be the source of the substance used.

But this attack on Skripal and his 33-year-old daughter (by somebody) is highly useful to those who want to vilify Vladimir Putin, just as the use of chemical weapons in Syria last April (by somebody) was useful for those wanting to further vilify Bashar Assad and justify a U.S. missile strike. Have you noticed that we live in an age of constant disinformation, misinformation and “fake news”?

The most annoying thing is, once these unproven causal relations are posited, embraced by cable news directors, such that they become Truth, discussion centers solely on how the U.S. and allies should respond. Why, pundits ask, didn’t Trump raise the issue in his last chat with Putin? Why is Britain’s Labour Party leader Jeremy Corbyn skeptical about the Russia link, suggesting the Novichok could have been possessed by East European mafia? Why isn’t everyone on board the obvious conclusion that Russia did it?

Which would mean: Putin—facing no threat from this traded ex-spy or his innocent daughter—ordered their killing, not because they threatened him, but rather to manifest his deep cruelty and evil to the world and his willingness to invite more and more sanctions against Russia. It doesn’t make much sense.

Putin is ex-KGB. Very rational and calm. He knows all about agents and double agents. I doubt that he is morally judgmental; he understands why people do what Skripal did. He made a deal for the man’s release eight years ago. His only motive to kill him at this point would be to punish Skripal for past sins and warn others not to ever sell secrets. But why would such a rational person incur global outrage by using a banned agent to attempt to murder a British citizen and his Russian daughter, for no compelling reason?

There are international legal processes for investigating charges of use of chemical weapons. Russia has asked Britain to observe them, providing evidence, samples, details. It urges adherence to rules established by the Organization for the Prohibition of Chemical Weapons (OPCW) to establish the facts. But London has merely announced it knows Putin was responsible for the state of these two on that park bench.

So the grand narrative now includes: Russian invasions of Georgia in 2008 and Ukraine in 2014 (somehow becoming in the process “adversaries” of the U.S.); alleged “threats” against the Baltic states; multiple political assassinations; dictatorial control of the Russian polity, economy and media; the accumulation of billions in illicit wealth. To say nothing of his brash exposure of his naked chest to his fandom, his judo, his hunting, his annoyingly high approval ratings.

I don’t know who attacked these two who now struggle for their lives in hospital. But I know that the response means nothing good for Russia, or the world. It is just another short chapter in the new Cold War, and like the old war, basically irrational. What is Putin’s motive? Fareed Zakaria says he’s trying to “undermine democracies” although why anyone would want to do that in principle puzzles me. Putin is not the Heath Ledger’s Joker in the Dark Knight Batman film, just spreading chaos for its own sake.

Putin is not interested in heading a European movement towards isolationist nationalisms but rather in thwarting NATO expansion plans, which any rational Russian leader would want to do. To use the strange Skripal incident as a rationale for further Cold War-type confrontation is more than sad.  Yet in a supposed display of solidarity with Britain, which has kicked out Russian diplomats in response, the U.S. has suddenly expelled 60 Russian diplomats and closed down the Russian consulate in Seattle. Trump, under constant criticism for not criticizing Putin, and not bringing up election meddling or the Skripal affair in his recent phone call, has approved the move without commenting on it.

If Trump planned for better relations with Russia to be a hallmark of his presidency, he has been stymied by his foes’ insistence that he express the traditional knee-jerk hostility. Why, they keep asking, when he criticizes his own cabinet members, does he never say anything bad about Putin? And from there, they proceed to the conclusion that the Russians have stuff on Trump and are blackmailing him…into not being default-mode hostile.

Trump is an ignorant man, uninterested in the world intellectually, unable to invest time in reading, clueless about the historical context of current crises. Part of his candidate persona was opposition to recent U.S. wars (not so much because they’ve killed hundreds of thousands of people, but because they have been expensive and not resulted in the U.S. taking the oil). But he loves men in uniform, surrounds himself with them, relies on them. These are men who grew up during the Cold War and can’t kick it from their minds. Baby-sitting what they surely see (with McMaster) as a “moron,” “idiot,” “dope,” “kindergartner” they see their minimal task the responsibility to remind him that Russia is an adversary.

And so without even ascertaining the facts of the Skripal incident, Washington expels all these diplomats. TV pundits applaud: “absolutely the right thing to do, to defend western values” etc. , the system succeeds in maintaining, even strengthening, Cold War Russophobic mentality. The Skripal incident was a blessing to Trump’s critics, who want him with his child-mind to embrace this mentality. We have to support Theresa May in Britain, they told him. This was the first offensive use of  a nerve agent in Europe since World War II, they told him; very, very serious. A Russian attack on the UK.

Whoever administered that agent triggered a wave of sanctions on Russia, adding to those earlier imposed after the 2014 coup in Ukraine and the Russian response. Russia will respond proportionately. Whoever did this forces Trump to harden a political line against Russia. As his presidency teeters in the winds of scandal, he is prone to more crazy moves like the appointment of John Bolton. Trump’s sole saving grace in his campaign was his advocacy of better ties with Russia. This immediately upon his election became his chief fault. Pundits  demand that he  abandon any hope for cordial relations with Putin’s Russia and properly denounce him for multiple crimes.

Maybe that’s what’s in store. Trump’s unpredictable. He agrees to meet Kim Jong Un then appoints Bolton (advocate of war with North Korea, removed from negotiations with the DPRK  after Pyongyang called him “human scum”) as national security advisor. And why follow up that cordial call to Putin with the expulsion of so many diplomats? What the hell. Doesn’t make sense.

Had Hillary won, I would probably have found some logic and predictability in her evil. With Trump the evil unfolds erratically. He drops a MOAB on Afghanistan (or his generals do, without necessarily consulting). He attacks a Syrian army base in response to an unproven sarin attack. His cabinet members contradict him, espousing the gospel truth that Russia and its allies such as Syria are threats to U.S. national security, whatever that is. One feels that as his personal situation deteriorates, the president will be more prone to lean on his generals, and listen to their advice while also heeding the horrific Bolton. This is a very bad situation.

4/05 Update:
Double miracle as BOTH Skripals are now said to be recovering from deadly nerve agent attack. How?

Saturday Matinee: Testament

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Cover Your Eyes: Lynne Littman’s ‘Testament’, 1983

By Richard McKenna

Source: We Are the Mutants

Testament
Directed by Lynne Littman
Paramount Pictures, 1983

1983 was a pretty fertile year for fictional nuclear apocalypses in Western popular culture. 2019: After the Fall of New York, Endgame, Exterminators of the Year 3000, Stryker, and Le Dernier Combat were released in cinemas, while ABC’s The Day After and Britain’s BBC2 adaptation of 1961 dystopian novel The Old Men at the Zoo, updated to feature a nuclear attack on London, appeared on television. Publishers released a slew of books with atomic mushrooms on their covers, including The Aftermath: The Human and Ecological Consequences of Nuclear War (edited by Jeannie Peterson), Luke Rhinehart’s Long Voyage Back, William Prochnau’s Trinity’s Child, and Dean Ing’s Pulling Through, as well as The Web, that year’s installment in Jerry Ahern’s Survivalist series. All of them attempted, seriously or otherwise—and it was generally otherwise—to examine the effects of a seemingly imminent nuclear war. The Doomsday Clock stood at four minutes to midnight (the closest it had been since 1960, though it was about to move even closer) and two events that year—the NATO military exercise Able Archer 83 and a nuclear attack false alarm in the Soviet Union—almost prompted a catastrophic escalation from fiction to reality.

The BBC’s optimism-annihilating Threads was still a year away, but the cultural momentum was building up to a psychological discharge whose blast radius would, for some, obliterate their ability to think about or plan for the future: what was the point, when they would be spending it eking out a life in the radioactive ruins of our civilization (or, if the Italians were right, driving customized cars and dressing like members of Krokus). That momentum surged dramatically with the release of Testament, the high water mark of the class of ’83. British sci-fi and horror magazine Starburst published a short yet positive review of it alongside a single publicity still showing a mother huddled up in bed with her children, fearfully pointing a torch into the darkness—an image that summarized perfectly the fear that it would be in our own homes that we would be killed, if not by the bomb itself then by the stone-age appetites and economics its detonation unleashed.

Despite containing no mushroom clouds, no heroics, no fallout shelters, no special effects, no geiger counters, and no enormous doors slamming in the depths of hell, Testament is absolutely devastating: nothing except average people gradually realizing that the rest of their already abbreviated lives is destined to be a grim slog through even more illness, death, and loss than they’ve already experienced.

The film, produced by PBS and directed by National Education Television documentarian Lynne Littman, deals with the effects of a nuclear attack on a family who live in an idyllic small town (so idyllic that a young Kevin Costner and Rebecca De Mornay have settled there) somewhere within driving distance of San Francisco, and the first ten minutes is an artfully contrived little précis of their privileged lives: we see mom Carol (the great Jane Alexander) unenthusiastically acting out the instructions on her workout tape from bed while husband Tom (the also great William Devane) blithely takes their reluctant older son Brad cycling, leaving mom to get teenage daughter Mary (Roxana Zal) and little son Scotty (Lukas Haas) ready for school.

This initial section of the film highlights the reassuring frivolities and ephemera of Western life—toys, games, sports, exercise, E.T. t-shirts, He-Man figures and Sesame Street, and, in a way, Testament plays peculiarly like some kind of anti-E.T., or at least some nightmarish re-edit of its homely, chaotic, childish motifs, the intruder into the suburban calm not a kindly alien botanist but something native and altogether less friendly.

There is almost no buildup to the nuclear attack—no news reports about the mobilization of the armed forces, no preparations for shelter. The only indication that an attack is coming at all is that the nature of the film indicates that it must be, and the lack of narrative preparation makes the viewer’s stomach sink even more violently when the cartoon the family children are watching in their sunny lounge is suddenly replaced by static, which is then replaced by an emergency warning transmission. When the attack itself comes, it’s not even a noise, just a silent flash of blinding light. There are none of the typical signifiers: no models are destroyed, there is no colorized stock footage of shacks being blown away by 1,000 mph winds, no flesh drooping from bones, no radiation sickness makeup—only confusion, then coffins, and then funeral pyres. As the broadcasters who exchange news with the town’s chipper old radio ham start to vanish one by one, awareness grows that this might really be it—there might really be no hope.

The locals pull together and, unable to believe that the wider world won’t rally, seem determined to struggle through, organizing mutual assistance and continuing with their little world of school plays and piano lessons. But it gradually becomes more and more obvious that there is going to be no struggling through this one. Things are not going to return to normal—they are just going to keep getting worse, and there won’t be any school plays when all the children have died and all the adults are busy building bonfires to burn their corpses on.

The delicacy of touch with which the proceedings are handled—director Littman got the rights to the source material, a 1981 short story by Carol Amen, after reading it with her son—means that Testament makes its point all the more forcefully. Yes, very occasionally the tone does get slightly preachy, but considering the point the film wants to make—the stupidity of slowly and agonizingly killing half of the population of the planet—it’s a forgivable blip. In any event, Testament never feels smug or self-righteous: there are a few things that jar, and others that produce the odd smirk (a display of priestly affection very unlike that in Thorn Birds, a TV miniseries that caused a scandal the same year that Testament was released), but, most of the time, the viewer is simply staring at the screen in dread.

With its calm tonal palette and inoffensive James Horner score, suggestive of TV movies about domestic tragedy on the scale of divorce or alcoholism, one can imagine a grandparent of any political persuasion sitting down to watch it. In terms of production values, Testament sits somewhere between that well-made TV movie and a feature film proper, and its artlessness and lack of pretension, make it, if anything, even more upsetting and disorientating when things start to get really awful. Handled with a little less sensitivity and compassion, it could easily have been mawkish; but it isn’t, and Testament refuses to underline any particular aspect of the situation. There is simply the grind of life getting worse and worse until it is intolerably awful and you cannot survive. The economy with which the characters are sketched lends them a blank credibility, and the absence of any of the iconography of nuclear war (not even a single radioactive symbol) only adds to the film’s power.

Throughout the film, motifs of recording and repetition recur: family super-8 movies, nursery rhymes, the exercise cassette that mom is playing at the beginning, the answering machine, the pre-recorded warning message, the journal that Carol starts writing at the beginning of the film, even the roles of priest, mom, and policeman. It is when the graves turn to funeral pyres that the gravity of the situation becomes obvious, and perhaps the point is that the repetition and formalization of daily life is life. Deprived of the batteries and security and hope that allow us make those repetitions, the life we know ends as the recordings wind down. One very touching moment, when mom and son dance together to a (not very good) cover of the Beatles’ “All My Loving” played on a battery powered recorder, underlines perfectly the finite nature of the technologies we use to remember who we are.

The film is dotted with such lovely little scenes, like the one where Brad takes his late dad’s bike from the garage after his own has been stolen, and another when Mary asks Carol what it’s like to make love. Nobody is blamed for the war, and there’s no mention of politics, or enemy countries, or presidents. By definition it is probably a left-wing film (Amen’s original story appeared in feminist magazine Ms.), at least in as much as it aims to affect the opinion of the viewer as regards the effectiveness of a nuclear deterrent, and it is conceivable that to some particularly ideologically-driven idiots at the time it may have looked like liberal hand-wringing.

Testament isn’t perfect, but it is a powerful and economic piece of drama about personal loss and mass death that eschews all spectacle and seems to have no particular axe to grind other than to ask: What is the conceivable purpose of all this misery? It’s a point that bears repeating.

Watch the full film here.