The Demonization of Russia by The United States

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.