The Demonization of Russia by The United States

By Manuel E. Yepe

http://manuelyepe.wordpress.com/
Exclusive for the daily POR ESTO! of Merida, Mexico. 

Translated and edited by Walter Lippmann. 

In the original Cold War there was a certain balance between the contending parties.

This led independent observers to believe that the Soviet Union, decimated in World War II, was so keen on maintaining peace that Washington could achieve an advantageous agreement for the West and avoid the possibility of nuclear war without making too many concessions.

However, U.S. diplomacy and propaganda had become fixated on a campaign to demonize Russia. This considerably diminished following the dissolution of the Soviet Union. But in very recent times it has been revived due to the visceral hatred of Democratic Party supporters towards Trump, after Hillary Clinton’s humiliating defeat in the 2016 presidential election.

The Democratic Party leaders blamed Hillary Clinton’s defeat on the interference in US elections by Vladimir Putin. This was a justifying argument to be fed to Democratic followers, ashamed of their terrible performance against a “minor” opponent like Donald Trump, at the time considered an upstart in “major politics.”

Irish journalist Bryan MacDonald, in a recently published article, analyzed the presidential race of Vladimir Putin and the reasons for his growing popularity in Russia.

Firstly, he considers that Putin’s victory in the most recent elections was involuntarily facilitated by the West.

Western leaders and opinion makers in Washington believed that sanctions and economic pressure would encourage Russians to become more active against Putin. But they couldn’t have been more wrong.

In this respect, Alexey Pushkov, representative of the Council of the Russian Federation notes that: “Putin’s demonization by the West has had the opposite effect in Russia: citizens have rallied around their top figure in an unprecedented way. The results of the elections confirm this”.

It is fitting to recall that in 2011 and 2012 there were demonstrations in Moscow organized by a group that was baptized as the “Moscow elite” against President Putin.

Western media correspondents accredited in the Russian capital, with little knowledge about the situation in the rest of the country, made their readers and/or viewers believe that something substantial was taking place, when the reality was much less dramatic.

Although the Kremlin suspected interference, Hillary Clinton, then U.S. Secretary of State, had really very little influence on these events.

The situation was totally different from what had occurred in 2013 and 2014 in the Ukraine, when the United States openly intervened in support of the street protests against the Russian Government.

Another fact that illustrates this point was the vicious campaign of attacks against Russia in connection with the case of the former double agent Sergei Skripal.

In the words of Andrei Kondrashov, spokesman for the Putin’s election campaign in Moscow: “Voter turnout was eight to ten percent higher than we expected, because the United Kingdom, pretending otherwise, pressured us right at the precise moment when we had to mobilize to go out and vote.”

Kondrashov, ironically, thanked the British Government for that result. The accusations made by London against Moscow in relation to the poisoning of the former double agent Skripal helped bring about the surge in the number of voters who participated on the March, 2018 presidential elections in Moscow.

The spokesperson said that the high turnout at the polls was proof of the way Russian people reacted when their country was accused “out loud and without evidence.”

The dispute around the attempted murder of agent Sergei Skripal with poison gas increased electoral turnout by several percentage points, according to the spokesman. At the end of the day, Putin was the ample winner of the contest.

Russians are fully aware that the campaigns against their country and the demonization of their president require a strong citizen response. They generally support the status of Crimea and resent the anti-Russian hysteria in the West.

In fact, it is precisely this negative image of Russia, broadcast in the West, that has determined the repeated success of Putin in various electoral consultations.

For years it has been more than evident that the foreign policy of the United States should draw lessons from these procedures which have been proven to be counterproductive in other parts of the world.

An extreme example of this is the genocidal siege policy held for 60 years against Cuba. A policy almost unanimously rejected by the world community of nations.

January 17, 2019.

NATO’S Cruel 70-Year History

By Manuel E. Yepe

http://manuelyepe.wordpress.com/
Exclusive for the daily POR ESTO! of Merida, Mexico. 

Translated and edited by Walter Lippmann. 

The ultra reactionary American writer, columnist, politician, and radio commentator Patrick (Pat) Joseph Buchanan recalled, on January 18^th in his column widely circulated in several countries, that on this date, seventy years ago, the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO) was formed. He did so with a memorable quotation from the undisputed French leader General Charles De Gaulle who said in 1966, when he was ordered to leave his headquarters in Paris: “Treaties are like roses and young girls. They last while they last.”

“NATO this year celebrates a major birthday. The young girl of 1966 is no longer young. The alliance is 70 years old.

“And under this aging NATO today, the U.S. is committed to treat an attack on any one of 28 nations, from Estonia to Montenegro to Romania to Albania, as an attack on the United States.

The time is ripe for a strategic review of these war guarantees to fight a nuclear-armed Russia in defense of countries across the length of Europe that few could find on a map.”

“Apparently,” Buchanan writes, “President Donald Trump, on trips to Europe, raised questions as to whether these war guarantees comport with vital U.S. interests and whether they could pass a rigorous cost-benefit analysis.

Trump even raised this issue in front of Europeans and suggested that the establishment, frozen in the realities of yesterday, should study the matter in the light of current events and ought to be made to justify these sweeping war guarantees.

In 1989, the Berlin Wall was torn down, Germany joined NATO, the Warsaw Pact was dissolved, the USSR was divided into several nations and Leninism expired in its place of origin.

As the threat that had led to NATO disappeared, many argued that the alliance created to deal with that alleged Soviet threat should be allowed to fade away, and Europe should now provide for its own defense.

It was not to be. The architect of Cold War containment, Dr. George Kennan, US Ambassador to Moscow, warned that moving NATO into Eastern Europe and former Soviet republics would prove a “fateful error.”

Soon afterwards, the doctrine of “containment” became official U.S. policy,  and even Kennan himself, whose policies he had helped launch, started criticizing them.

Before the end of the year 1948, Ambassador Kennan was convinced that negotiations could be initiated with the Soviet government, but his proposals were rejected by the Truman administration.

“But Kennan was right,” says Buchanan. “America is now burdened with the duty to defend Europe from the Atlantic to the Baltic, even as we face a far greater threat in China, with an economy and population 10 times that of Russia.”

“And we must do this with a defense budget that is not half the share of the federal budget or the GDP that Eisenhower and Kennedy had.”

 “Trump is president today because the American people concluded that our foreign policy elite, with their endless interventions where no vital U.S. interest was imperiled, had bled and virtually bankrupted us, while kicking away all of the fruits of our Cold War victory,” says Buchanan

 “Halfway into Trump’s term, the question is whether he is going to just talk about halting Cold War II with Russia, about demanding that Europe pay for its own defense, and about bringing the troops home — or whether he is going to act upon his convictions,” says Buchanan.

Celebrated as “the most successful alliance in history,” NATO has had two histories.

The capitalist version is that in 1948, Soviet troops, occupying eastern Germany all the way to the Elbe and surrounding Berlin, imposed a blockade on the city. The regime in Prague was overthrown in a Communist coup. In 1949, Stalin exploded an atomic bomb equal in power to the ones that the United States – inhumanly and unnecessarily—had exploded in two densely populated Japanese cities causing a still uncalculated number of victims.  

As the U.S. Army had gone home after V-E Day, Washington formed a new alliance to supposedly protect the crucial European powers and make sure that all of them remained at its service.

What remains of NATO today is twelve nations that, with more or less consistency, serve the interests of the greatest superpower which has not yet stopped aspiring to be the only one.”

January 21, 2019.

The U.S. War Against The Weak

By Manuel E. Yepe

http://manuelyepe.wordpress.com/
Exclusive for the daily POR ESTO! of Merida, Mexico. 

Translated and edited by Walter Lippmann. 

War Against the Weak is a well-documented book of more than half a thousand pages, written by Edwin Black. It describes a criminal operation planned by the United States from the beginning of the twentieth century and put into practice between the 1930’s and 1960s  with the purpose of creating a dominant superior race.

That U.S. campaign, virtually ignored in the world today because of the media cover up to which it has been subjected, served as a model for the Holocaust of the Jewish population carried out by Adolf Hitler’s Nazi Germany.

Characters and institutions in politics and the economy that today are presented as respectable champions of democracy and respect for human rights, were involved in this genocide.

The book tells us that, in the first six decades of the 20th century, hundreds of thousands of Americans labeled as feeble minded –because they did not conform to Teutonic patterns– were deprived of their right to reproduce.

Selected in prisons, asylums and orphanages because of who their ancestorswere, their national origin, ethnicity, race or religion, they were sterilized without their consent, and prevented from procreating and getting married. They were separated from their partners by governmental bureaucratic means.

This pernicious white collar war was conducted by philanthropic organizations, prestigious professors in elite universities, wealthy businessmen, and senior government officials who formed a pseudoscientific movement called Eugenics Its purpose, beyond racism, was to create a superior Nordic race that would impose itself at global level.

The eugenics movement gradually built up a national legal and bureaucratic infrastructure to cleanse the United States of the “unfit.” Intelligence tests colloquially known as “IQ measurements” were invented to justify the exclusion of the “weak-minded”, who were often nothing more than shy people or persons who spoke another language, or who had a different skin color.

Forced sterilization laws were enacted in some 27 US states to prevent the persons so detected from reproducing. Marriage bans proliferated to prevent race mixing. Numerous lawsuits, whose real purpose was to impose eugenics and its tactics in everyday life, reached the Supreme Court of the United States.

The plan was to immediately sterilize 14 million people in the United States and several million more in other parts of the world so that, at a later stage, they could continue eradicating the rest of the “weak” and leave only the purebred Nordics on the planet.

In the 1930’s, some 60,000 people were coercively sterilized. and an incalculable number of marriages were banned by state laws stemming from racism, ethnic hatred and academic elitism, covered with a mantle of respectable science.

Eugenics, whose objectives were global, was spread by U.S. evangelists to Europe, Asia and Latin America forming a well-woven network of movements with similar practices. By means of lectures, publications and other means, they kept its advocates on the lookout for opportunities for the expansion of their ideas and purposes.

Thus it arrived in Germany, where it fascinated Adolf Hitler and the Nazi movement. German National Socialism transformed the U.S. search for a “superior Nordic race” into what was Hitler’s struggle for a “dominant Aryan race.”

Nazi eugenics quickly displaced American eugenics because of its fierceness and speed, as well as by the scientific rationality applied by the murderous doctors of Auschwitz. The process had been previously rehearsed at the Cold Spring Harbor Eugenic Labs on Long Island, New York, with the financial support of the Rockefeller, Carnegie, and Harriman foundations in whose laboratories the eugenics experiments, that culminated in Auschwitz, began.

When the extermination of Jews was described as genocide in the Nuremberg Trial, the U.S. institutions linked to the practice of eugenics, it was renamed “genetics” and continued its sinister projects for more than a decade.

Edwin Black’s book, a jewel of investigative journalism, provides the reader with the possibility of seeing the common kinship and features of this tragic history with the circumstances the U.S. population faces today.

For electoral purposes, from the beginning of his election campaign, Donald Trump raised the “America First” slogan, backed up with many of his own manifestations of xenophobia, rejection of immigrants and proven identification with white supremacists. He did this within the scenario of deep political fragmentation of a country whose ruling elite has been able to keep the population focused on the naïve alternative between Democrats or Republicans.

Any similarity is pure coincidencidental!

December 31, 2019.

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