HOW I GOT HERE

 

Some months ago, Phil Butler invited me to contribute to a book to tell the stories of some people who are active in countering the anti-Russian line that has become so predominant in the West. Having read it, I find a common thread among most of the contributors. And that is that some excessively one-sided coverage of events – the Sochi Olympics and Ukraine are often mentioned – triggered their scepticism. It couldn't possibly be that one-sided they thought and they started to look elsewhere for information. This swiftly made them realise that almost everything in the Western MSM about Russia (and many other topics) is lies. Once they understood that, there was no way back.

 

I recommend the book https://www.amazon.com/Putins-Praetorians-Confessions-Kremlin-Trolls-ebook/dp/B076SS88CP/

 

I suspect most readers and commenters on this site have been through a similar journey. Anyway, here is mine.

 

I started work for the Canadian Department of National Defence in 1977 in the Directorate of Land Operational Research of the Operational Research and Analysis Establishment. I participated in many training games in real time and research games in very slow time. The scenarios were always the same: we (Canada had a brigade group in West Germany) were defending against an attack by the Soviet/Warsaw Pact side. In those days NATO was a defensive organisation and, as we later found out, so was the other side: each was awaiting the other to attack. Which, come to think of it, is probably why we're all here today.

I enjoyed my six years, often as the only civilian in a sea of uniforms, but I realised that a history PhD stood no change of running the directorate so, when the slot opened, I contrived to switch to the Directorate of Strategic Analysis as the USSR guy. I should say straight off that I have never taken a university course on Russia or the USSR. And, in retrospect, I think that was fortunate because in much of the English-speaking world the field seems to be dominated by Balts, Poles or Ukrainians who hate Russia. So I avoided that "Russians are the enemy, whatever flag they fly" indoctrination: I always thought the Russians were just as much the victims of the ideology as any one else and am amused how the others have airbrushed their Bolsheviks out of their pictures just as determinedly as Stalin removed "unpersons" from his.

That was November 1984 and Chernenko was GenSek and, when he died in March 1985, Gorbachev succeeded. While I didn't think the USSR was all that healthy or successful an enterprise, I did expect it to last a lot longer and when Gorbachev started talking about glasnost and perestroyka I thought back to the 20th Party Congress, the Lieberman reforms, Andropov's reforms and didn't expect much.

In 1987 two things made me think again. I attended a Wilton Park conference (the first of many) attended by Dr Leonid Abalkin. He took the conference over and, with the patient interpretation of someone from the Embassy, talked for hours. The Soviet economy was a failure and couldn't be reformed. That was something different. Then, on the front page of Pravda, appeared a short essay with the title "A New Philosophy of Foreign Policy" by Yevgeniy Primakov. I pricked up my ears: a new philosophy? But surely good old Marxism-Leninism is valid for all times and places. As I read on, I realised that this was also something new: the author was bluntly saying that Soviet foreign policy had been a failure, it was ruining the country and creating enemies. These two were telling us that the USSR just didn't work. As Putin told Stone, "it was not efficient in its roots".

These things convinced me that real change was being attempted. Not just fiddling around at the edges but something that would end the whole Marxist-Leninist construct. As far as I was concerned, it had been the communist system that was our enemy and, if it was thrown off, we should be happy. Sometime around then I was interviewed for a job at NATO and the question was what, with all these changes, was NATO's future. I said it should become an alliance of the civilised countries against whatever dangers were out there: the present members of course, but also the USSR, Japan and so on.

Well, that didn't happen did it? I remember a very knowledgeable boss assuring me that NATO expansion was such a stupid idea that it would never happen. He was wrong too.

In 1814 the victors – Britain, Russia, Prussia and Austria – sat down in Vienna, with France, to re-design the world. They were wise enough to understood that a settlement that excluded France wouldn't last. In 1919 this was forgotten and the settlement – and short-lived it was – excluded the loser. In 1945 Japan and Germany were included in the winners' circle. At the end of the Cold War, repeating the Versailles mistake, we excluded Russia. It was soon obvious, whatever meretricious platitudes stumbled from the lips of wooden-faced stooges, that NATO was an anti-Russia organisation of the "winners".

But I retained hope. I think my most reprinted piece has been "The Third Turn" of November 2010 and in it I argued that Russia had passed through two periods in the Western imagination: first as the Little Brother then as the Assertive Enemy but that we were now approaching a time in which it would be seen as a normal country.

Well, that didn't happen did it?

And so the great opportunity to integrate Russia into the winners' circle was thrown away.

For a long time I thought it was stupidity and ignorance. I knew the implacably hostile were out there: Brzezinski and the legions of "think" tanks (my website has a collection of anti-Russia quotations I've collected over the years) but I greatly underestimated their persistence. Stupidity and ignorance; you can argue with those (or hope to). But you can't argue with the anti-Russians. Russia wants to re-conquer the empire so it invaded Georgia. But it didn't hold on to it, did it? No but that's because we stopped it. Putin kills reporters. Name one. You know, whatshername. Provocative exercises on NATO's borders. But NATO keeps moving closer to Russia. Irrelevant, NATO's peaceful. Putin is the richest thief in the world. Says who? Everybody. Putin hacked the US election. How? Somehow.

I quoted Hanlan's razor a lot – "never attribute to malice that which is adequately explained by stupidity". And, stupidity and ignorance there were (a favourite being John McCain's notion that the appropriate venue for a response to a Putin piece in the NYT was Pravda. And then he picked the wrong Pravda! (But he won't hate Russia or Putin any the less if he were told that, would he?) At some point I came to understand that malice was the real driver.

I suppose it grew on me bit by bit – all the stupidity converged on the same point and it never stopped; but real stupidity and ignorance don't work that way: people learn, however slowly. I think the change for me was Libya. I started out thinking stupidity but, as it piled up, it became clear that it was malice. I'd seen lies in the Kosovo war but it was Libya that convinced me that it wasn't just a few lies, it was all lies. (My guess is that Libya was an important development in Putin's view of NATO/US too.)

Naive perhaps but, for most of history stupidity has adequately explained things and malice is, after all, a species of stupidity.

So what's the point of writing? I'll never convince the Russia haters, and there's little chance of getting through to the stupid and ignorant. And most people aren't very interested anyway.

Well, this is where malice meets stupidity. If we consider the Project for a New American Century, the neocon game plan "to promote American global leadership", what do we see twenty years later? Brzezinski laid out the strategy in The Grand Chessboard at the same time. What today? Well, last year he had to admit that the "era" of US dominance, he was so confident of twenty years earlier, was over. There's no need to belabour the point: while the US by most measures is still the world's dominant power, its mighty military is defeated everywhere and doesn't realise it, its manufacturing capacity has been mostly outsourced to China, domestic politics and stability degenerate while we watch and there's opioids, spectacular debt levels, incarceration, infant mortality, недоговороспособны and on and on. Donald Trump was elected on the promise to Make America Great.... Again. Hardly the hyperpower to lead the globe is it?

The Twentieth Century was the "American Century" thanks to limitless manufacturing capacity allied to great inventiveness anchored on a stable political base. What is left of these three in 2017? Can America be made "great" again? And wars: wars everywhere and everywhere the same. And what other than malice has brought it to this state? Malice has become stupidity: the neocons, Brzezinskis, the Russia haters, the Exceptionalists, scheming "to promote American global leadership", have weakened the USA. Perhaps irreparably.

So, who's the audience today? The converted and people at the point when a little push can break their conditioning have always been there. But now there is a potentially huge audience for our efforts: the audience of the awakening.

Which brings me back to where I started. Except that it's the USA this time:

IT'S NOT WORKING

We're here and we're waiting for you: you've been lied to but that doesn't mean that everything is a lie.

Comments

[Bill Herschel]

How do you support this statement:

"RUSSIA INC. I expand on something I wrote some time ago. Russia is a “full-service” economy. One of four on the planet. It and China are going up; the USA and the EU are going down."

The U.S. GDP is rising. The stock market is booming. We are at full employment. I don't see the going down part.

[Walrus]

Fantasy indeed. The Chinese are very conscious of the fact that the Bumi Putra have a long history of anti chinese pogroms often justified by islamic sentiments. Saudi has been investing in Wahabi madrassas in Asia for at least 30 years as well. The result is a toxic mixture of jihadism, nationalism and anti chinese sentiment.

[J]

Here's what the new Saudi Prince has been pitching:

http://futureinvestmentinitiative.com/en/about

Looks like the old adage that PT Barnum uttered has come true, there's a sucker born every minute. The Saudi soon-to-be-king has thrown out his bait, and the neophyte are biting, hook, line, and sinker.

[Dubhaltach]

In reply to Pacifica Advocate 28 October 2017 at 02:39 PM

All it takes to refute this delusional nonsense you spout is one word:

Marawi

[johnf]

Entirely agree with that.

I also think that Trump's victory was down to an anti-war vote in the mid-Western states which had previously voted Sanders in the primaries. And, whatever his grotesque contortions in office (mainly to placate AIPAC), he still seems broadly to be sticking to that script. In Britain we don't appear to have either a prime minister or a government, so I'm not sure who they're going to declate war on (except on each other).

I think the Western electorates have turned their back on war.

[confusedponderer]

FB Ali,
re: "The foolish Saudi princeling, who now talks of revising the Wahhabi creed, doesn't realise that he is digging the grave of the House of Saud."

A foolish princeling indeed. The nutters he's empowering and funding have no great respect for their supporters, in fact, by declaring their caliphate without asking Saudi princes they challenged the Saudis, who asssert that they alone have the right to declare such things.

AQ and ISIS folks are unlikely to forgive such views. What happened to Ghaddafi speaks for itself. Supporting these folks is not just ruthless and murderous, but also quite shortsighted. That said, err, written: The Saudi princeling may, while at it, just be digging his own grave.

And to add to these idiotic ideas also absurdities - the princeling is 'en passant' chasing other weirdo dreams, like for example building NEOM, "the greatest city" of the world or something. Yes, clearly, what the Saudis need is more big cities.

https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2017-10-24/saudi-arabia-to-build-new-mega-city-on-country-s-north-coast

IMO the problems with princelings like that come from the fact that they never needed to work for their privileges and wealth. They inherited both.

Since they just 'have it', they don't appreciate the trouble involved of building it. Pissing wealth away is a right of privilege, not a matter of sense or sensibility. The latter are questions that don't come up.

So, the Saudis, after bombing the country for a considerable time, don't succeed in Yemen.

What they brought the place is a lot o killing, a siege, murderous Islamists like AQ and ISIS, and while at it, the threat of hunger and a hard cholera epidemy. Fighting on the ground doesn't go well, and thus they ask for other Arabs, Pakistanis and Egyptians to fight for them the war they started, while blaming, of course, Iran.

http://www.who.int/mediacentre/news/releases/2017/cholera-yemen-mark/en/

https://www.huffingtonpost.com/alastair-crooke/saudi-arabia-yemen-east_b_7163776.html

http://www.aljazeera.com/indepth/features/2017/08/saudi-arabia-war-yemen-strategic-failure-170823072854582.html

With such glorious 'missions accomplished', let's generously call it 'a Saudi royal serial success'.

[Patrick Armstrong]

Look around you. Up or down since you were a kid?

[Patrick Armstrong]

https://patrickarmstrong.ca/2017/10/12/exchange-rating-russia-down-and-out/

[Ishmael Zechariah]

BH,
Is your query above a rhetorical device?
Thanks for any clarification
Ishmael Zechariah

[Fred]

Bill

Sounds like we can cut welfare, SNAP and a whole lot of other transfer payments since people can find jobs all over the place.

[turcopolier]

PA

Peggy Noonan said on Mornin' Joe a week ago that the non-coastal middle and blue collar classes feel that society is collapsing around them. and that Trump's presidency and the rise of the GOP generally reflect that. She might not be invited back for a while. pl

[confusedponderer]

When I was in the army in my military service I was a 'Funker' in a communications regiment that was supporting III. Korps in Koblenz.

I was told during my NBC detect and decon training by an officer that the warsaw pact had aimed thirty (or so) nukes on the town of Koblenz. It left me speechless.

Koblenz surely was a 'high value target'. There were a lot of soldiers in and around town, and a corps HQ and a lot of civilians around. But thirty nukes? That IMO was simply a grand and deadly overkill. Because it was 'doable'?

I thank the Lord that the Cold War never 'got hot'. The heat and blast aside, radioactive stuff is a bad news for anyone, and it drifts.

I remember we were advised for a couple years after Chernobyl to not collect mushrooms in the woods, and not to eat them, because they had been consistently exposed to radioactivitive crap from the plant that drifted over to central and western Europe and fell down.

That fallout, iirc caesium stuff, can still be measured - some 31 years after the accident happened.

Well, the point is, central Germany is some 1600 km away from Chernobyl, and they, well, we, just were 'in the wind direction'. Close enough for fallout.

[Patrick Armstrong]

I think the audience is world-wide. I'm told, for example, that the German media is even more anti-Russian than the English-speaking media. But we see people waking up all over the place. The essence of the awakening is some trigger that makes the individual realise that our masters don't have our interests at heart and are lying to us.

[Antoinette Dhooghe]

Jerusalem and Riyadh working together : and much longer than we suppose they did on what apperead about it in public...

[LeaNder]

I'm told, for example, that the German media is even more anti-Russian than the English-speaking media.

Well that's German hubris once again. Familiar?

Concerning the latest US sanctions as you may imagine there was unisono applause from all over the place in media. For a moment it seemed the big fear that our most important protection against the biggest enemy out there was wavering in its guarantee to protect us. Given the new emperor and his defense recollection strategy. Mind you. North - East - West - South pretty united in fact. My God, once again the Russians are coming. We finally have to pay for out own defense? Considering Russia even for the most block-headed German it was quite easy to understand one day they would seek their well-deserved revenge.

The Southern even forgot for a moment that Switzerland could turn from defensive to offensive. You know: "Die Schweitzer kommen". A well rehearsed fear in the deep South ...

[Babak Makkinejad]

Yup, 2 million 850,000 jobs are removed from US and 2 million 450,000 jobs were created in 3rd World countries by US corporations. Such a massive wealth tranfer will have, at first, social consequences, and later, historical ones.
Caveat Emptor

[Babak Makkinejad]

Germans are also deeply prejudiced against Iran.

[Babak Makkinejad]

The Aramco IPO, NEOM, and allowing women to drive, as well as public speeches about economic reform are addressed squarely at the greedy, gulible, and stupid faranjis - like Americans.
It is an attempt at seduction and at damage control.

[Babak Makkinejad]

Yes, the were caught in their own spider web.

[SmoothieX12]

posted and followed by millions of ordinary Americans - and showing great wit and irony and genuine feeling and contempt for Clinton's virulent anti-Russian campaign, to realize that there are huge numbers of ordinary Americans who are thinking for themselves and not swallowing the warmongers propaganda.

Absolutely, 100% true. Remarkably, a huge percentage of these Americans are not urbanites from affluent and "liberal" and supposedly "educated" centers.

[LondonBob]

Nonsense, the Bolsheviks who were still running the Soviet Union wanting their world revolution with its war of conquest, whilst Hitler wanted his lebensraum in Eastern Europe. Hitler had no interest in merely reuniting German populated lands, and he was of course a genocidal maniac, two points on which many took a more hopeful position as the alternative would be disastrous. At that point in time when the Soviet Union had already racked up a death toll of millions it was quite rightly regarded as enemy number one whilst people hoped Hitler's rhetoric was just that.

There was little Britain could do stop a war, although Chemberlain et al tried. France was still traumatised by their horrendous losses in WWI, Italy was ruled by Mussolini, the US stood aloof with no interest in maintaining the post war settlement, whilst Germany and Russia were determined to undermine it and gobble up as much of Eastern Europe as possible. There were no real options to prevent a generalised war, and that is what they got.

[J]

Patrick,

FYI

Russia pledges investment in Saudi NEOM city

https://youtu.be/yjD7mPZlhPk

[Account Deleted]

Babak

Assume you were responding to my earlier post and I agree with you re MBA curricula largely substituting for political manifestos these days in the West. My point was that the all-pervasive business school market forces dogma that triumphed at The End of History effectively represents the absence of a political ideology. Guess it comes down to whether a single consensus world-view without significant opposing doctrine can still be called an ideology.

[johnf]

Indeed in the West these days it seems that the more you are "educated" the more credulous and downright stupid you are likely to become, and the less "educated" you have been the more rational and level-headed you are likely to be.

[Bill Herschel]

Thank you for directing me to this essay. It doesn't prove that "the USA and the EU are going down", but it demonstrates emphatically that Russia is a formidable nation as it has been throughout history. It is a question of leadership, and if the evidence that the USA is going down is the quality of its leadership, it's going down.