July 12, 2018
MY CORNER by Boyd
Cathey
Hard Left and
Pseudo-Right Have Post-Communist Russia In Their Crosshairs
(Do We Really Need
NATO Now? Really?)
Friends,
Sometimes
I can sit through Fox’s Laura Ingraham—sometimes; but I’m not enamored of her
manner and demeanor, or many times, of what she says when it comes to foreign relations.
Yes, she has been compared to President Trump in her mannerism and rather
boisterous way of speaking…but the president’s way of talking comes across, at
least to me, as more genuine and direct and, well, logical.
Last
night, like virtually all the Neocon pundits and commentators on Fox (Tucker
Carlson being the near sole exception), Ms. Laura was back on the “Russia Card”
again. There she was parroting the Neocon narrative about Russia as if her very
life depended on it—that is, the narrative of those Neocons who have left the
dwindling and increasingly insane Never Trump band and who have jumped on the
Donald Trump bandwagon and now surround him and attempt to shape his foreign
policy to their liking. While they now
defend the president—and some like John Bolton have piled aboard his
administrative ship—they still continue to blame Russia, and especially that
evil genius, Vladimir Putin—the “new Hitler” to quote John McCain’s fanatical former
foreign policy advisor Max Boot (who is so Never Trump that he has resigned
from the GOP and says he hopes the Dems will win this November)—for almost
everything that has gone wrong and is going wrong in the world today (well,
some acute observers—Carlson, for instance—are beginning to understand that
China is and will be a much greater problem than post-Communist Russia could
ever hope to be).
I
have pointed out before—just this year in five MY CORNER columns, alone [go
check them out]—that it is both utterly fascinating AND very concerning to
watch how the establishment conservatives, the Neoconservatives who dominate
Fox, National Review, The Weekly Standard, The Wall Street Journal, most of the
so-called conservative think tanks, and most of the Republican Party leadership—how
they very conveniently agree with the Democrats and the hard Left that “Russia
is the enemy and Putin is the reincarnated Adolf Hitler.”
Yes,
they come at that conclusion from what appears to be diametrically opposite
reasoning, but, with close examination is revealed to be uncannily much the
same.
And
that—that fact—should scare the bejesus out of any self-respecting,
independently-thinking so-called “conservative.”
Prior
to 1990 the Democrats and the hard Left fell all over themselves in defending in
many ways what was then SOVIET Russia…let’s face it, for much of the 20th
century the hard left in the US had a passionate love affair with those
commissars in Moscow. Yes, it was off-again, then on-again. The Soviets has
tried to achieve a dream, they had failed, but their intentions were “right.” And,
yes, at times the ruthless praxis of those commissars came in for criticism
from the American Left. Many on the Left—those future Neocons—were turned off
by Moscow’s “authoritarianism” and, especially, its apparent post-war
persecution of mainly Russian Jewish Leftists (those particular Leftists weren’t
so much anti-Marxist, mind you; but rather wanted to give Marxism a slightly
more “human” and democratic face).
When
it came to dealing with the Reds, it was the Democratic Party and the American
Left that urged insistently for détente and peaceful coexistence. Not that
reaching some sort of modicum of stability was wrong—and even Republicans like
Nixon and Reagan understood that a broader strategy of true anti-Communism,
that is, eventual victory over it, included non-proliferation and nuclear
treaties, plus “talking to our enemies.”
But
after 1991, all of that changed, and changed radically. And with the advent of
President Vladimir Putin, the changes were even more dramatic.
Right
now the American hard Left and the near totality of the Democratic Party
violently oppose Russia and its president. Their main stated reason is that the Russians somehow “interfered in our
elections”: it’s the same trotted-out and rickety old reasoning that won’t
stand serious examination. And that, somehow, they were responsible for the
election of that Putin-stooge Donald Trump (right now with a Trump-Putin summit
occurring soon, a true blue Leftist should be shuddering and muttering expletives
about the “death of democracy” and the “rise of dictatorship” in America). Of
course, this represents a sea change from their views prior to 1990.
But,
now look at the dominant Neoconservative view of Russia: while those Neocons who
have jumped on the Donald Trump ship of state to serve THEIR own interests
downplay any real effect that the Russkies and the “new Hitler” would have had
back in the 2016 elections, they are just as hard on Russia as their Kabuki
dance ideological partners on the hard Left.
Both
the hard Left AND the dominant Republican/movement conservative views come
together on what they infelicitously call “human rights,” and “the new Hitler’s”
failure to implement the kind of simply wonderful and superb liberal democracy
and full-fledged equality that we now are experiencing—I would actually say “suffering
from”—here in the good ole’ US of A. You see, Russia just had national
elections back in the Spring and “the new Hitler” received around 70% plus of the
vote. And, even in the Democratic/NAACP-dominated Chicago projects or in the “socialist
republic of Silicon Valley” that sort of vote total is, well, just something to
dream about. How dare he!
Yet,
as I have pointed out previously in MY CORNER, there were over 1,000
independent poll watchers who certified that the elections in Russia were fair…and
without doubt much fairer than any recent election in Chicago, or Philadelphia,
or California (where thousands of illegals reportedly voted).
But
even that is not the major point of contention and anger that actually unites the
hard Left and the pseudo-Right (and Ms. Laura) in their frenzied Russophobia.
The actual reasons go deeper and they have much to do with the following facts:
1)
Since he began his tenure President
Putin has moved Russia to the traditional Right, socially, culturally AND
religiously; he has roundly disavowed and condemned the seven decades of Soviet
Communism AND disowned the Leftist ideology that spawned it, and returned to
traditional Russian nationalist views;
2)
During his presidency Putin has
overturned the near complete control of the infamous “Russian oligarchs” who
had a virtual stranglehold over the Russian economy and who were ineluctably conjoined
at the hip with international corporate interests on Wall Street and centered
in Brussels and Geneva—many of those oligarchs fled the country, some to Israel
(as many were Jewish): and, of course, their dispossession has resulted in the
usual and hackneyed cries of alarm that Putin is “anti-semitic” (and given the
genealogical provenance of many Neocons from the “Jewish Pale of Settlement” in
Tsarist Russia that factor is of extreme importance—they have never forgiven
Russian Christians and fear a recrudescence of Russian nationalism that they identify
with anti-semitism);
3)
It follows, then, that Russia is
charting its own independent economic course, to “make Russia great again,” but
NOT like did the Communists, but actually going back pre-Communist, pre-1918, to recover its national heritage,
and this new nationalism and populism is something that BOTH the American hard
Left and the pseudo (Neocon) Right hate and fear;
4)
Then, there is the almost totally
spurious accusation that Russia is still a powerfully “aggressive” nation that threatens
its neighbors and “has invaded Crimea, Georgia (not the Southern state!), and
Ukraine.” These accusations, to put it mildly, are bogus… I have covered them
in earlier MY CORNERs and in some longer published articles, also. Crimea was
never a part of Ukraine until 1954 when a drunken Nikita Khrushchev decided one
night to “give” it to that part of Russia that was then the Ukrainian SSR. Its
population and history are hugely Russian, and it voted overwhelmingly in a fair
plebiscite to rejoin Russia; it is that simple. The civil war in Ukraine dates
back to the fact that it was under Obama that our state department authorized
(and armed) a covert action to OVERTHROW a legitimately elected a pro-Russian
president of Ukraine, Viktor Yanukovych, and replace him with a globalist toady—and
don’t forget millions of Ukrainians are actually Russians and Russian language
speakers. Conflict came in the far east of the country when the new,
Obama-installed government began to crack down on the use of the Russian
language and circumscribe the rights of its Russian citizens. Finally, as to
Georgia, again, it was America that encouraged that country to invade areas
controlled by Russia in the Caucasus—the Russians struck back hard, and the
Georgians lost. They shouldn’t have listened to the globalists in the US state
department.
5)
And finally, Putin’s Russia has
forcefully re-asserted the role and importance of very traditional
Christianity—over 28,000 new churches have been opened in the country since
1991 and Putin has personally helped open and dedicate several on the sites
once occupied by Communist structures (that have been demolished). Even more—and
this is really a No-No here in the enlightened US of A, Putin and the
overwhelming majority of Russians, old AND young, staunchly favor the one-man
and one-woman, family, annealed by the inheritance of traditional Orthodox
Christianity; there is no same sex marriage in Russia, it is illegal. And this has meant that in Russia the LGBTQ
movement has not found favor all—On the contrary, indeed, it is now illegal to
proselytize for recruits in Russian schools, and public demonstrations by the LGBTQ
community in Russia are severely limited. As a result you have such valiant champions
of “conservatism” as John McCain, Lindsey Graham, Nikki Haley, etc. ad
nauseum, complaining about Russia’s “human rights” record.
Do you get it now? Are you SO fearful of that new Hitler and what
he might now tell his “puppet” to do—maybe start restricting same sex marriage,
maybe even question the value of NATO that was set up to oppose world
Communism, but, very frankly, has lost its raison
d’etre since 1991? Oh, I can hear
the gnashing of teeth from both the hard Left Dems and the globalist
GOPers! Did you actually say that? I just did.
In any case, I am going to pass on, again, two
essays (just the link to the first one) I’ve written on the topic, with more
detail and specific references. The first one was recent, back on January 1 of
this year. It updates in some respects the much longer piece I published on The Unz Review back on December 29,
2014. Although there have been changes politically since that date, the basic
thrust and facts contained in both are still valid, even more so, today.
You may not have the time to read these, or check
out the sources. But many of you were not on my mailing list back in 2014. So,
you may wish to save these for future reference.
Here is the link to the January 1, 2018 article:
And the longer 2014 research piece, the long and
researched essay I wrote, “Examining the Hatred of Vladimir Putin and Russia,” follows:
THE UNZ REVIEW: An Alternative Media Selection
Examining the Hatred of Vladimir Putin and Russia A Conservative Analysis by BOYD
D. CATHEY • DECEMBER 29, 2014
|
Anyone who has followed the ongoing crisis in Eastern Europe and
Ukraine knows the very hostile view that the establishment news media and
Washington political class have of President Vladimir Putin of Russia and his
policies. In the halls of Congress and in the mainstream press—almost every
night on Fox News—serious charges are proffered against Russia’s president and
his latest outrages. Sanctions and bellicose measures get enacted by the House
and Senate overwhelmingly, with only meagre opposition and almost no serious
discussion.
The mainstream American media and American political leaders
seem intent to present only a one-sided, very negative picture of the Russian
leader.
Various allegations are continually and repeatedly expressed.
How do these charges stand up under serious examination? What is
their origin? And, what do they say about the current political and cultural
environment in America and the West?
The allegations against Putin can be summarized in five major
points:
1.Putin is a
KGB thug and is surrounded by KGB thugs;
2.Under Putin
the Russian Orthodox Church continues to be controlled by KGB types;
3.Putin wants
to reassemble the old Soviet Union, and he believes that the break-up of the
USSR was the greatest tragedy of the 20th century;
4.Putin is
corrupt and has amassed billions of rubles personally skimmed off the top of
the weak Russian economy;
5.And he is an
anti-democratic authoritarian who persecutes homosexuals, in particular.
The charges
against Putin go from disingenuous to the dishonest. The “KGB thug” and the
“break-up” of the USSR accusations have been addressed in a variety of
well-researched books and in-depth articles. The documentation contradicts
these allegations, including some charges that have been made by usually
conservative voices. It is extremely curious that such ostensibly conservative
publications as The New American, for example, find
themselves parroting accusations first made by notorious leftwing publicists
and, then, by international gay rights supporters.
On the
contrary, various historians and researchers, including Professor Allen C.
Lynch (in his excellent study, Vladimir Putin and Russian
Statecraft, 2011), Professor Michael
Stuermer (in his volume, Putin and the Rise of Russia, 2008), M. S. King (in The War Against Putin, 2014), Reagan ambassador to the USSR Jack
Matlock, Reagan Assistant Secretary of the Treasury Paul Craig Roberts, former
Congressman Ron Paul (his web site, www.ronpaulinstitute.org, contains numerous scholarly articles defending
Putin), Reagan budget director David Stockman, and conservative writer William
Lind—none of these men on the Left—have pointed out that those allegations have
been ripped out of context and are largely untenable. Additionally, numerous
conservative religious authors have investigated and defended Putin, including
Catholic journalists such as Michael Matt in The Remnant, Dr. E. Michael Jones in Culture Wars, Dr. Joseph Pearce inThe St. Austin Review, and Gary Potter, and writers for conservative Protestant
organizations like the Gospel Defense League. Nevertheless, the charges
made against Putin are presented as fact by many Neoconservative “talking
heads” on Fox (e.g., Charles Krauthammer) and on talk radio (e.g., Rush
Limbaugh, Glenn Beck), as well as by the Leftist establishment media.
Disinformation is clearly at work here, even among some of the strongest voices
on the American right.
Professor Lynch reveals in his detailed study that the evidence
for the “Putin KGB thug” allegation is very thin and lacks substantial basis.
First, Putin was never “head of the KGB,” as some writers mistakenly (and,
often, maliciously) assert. That is simply a falsehood. Rather, he served as a
mid-level intelligence bureaucrat who sat at a desk in Dresden, East Germany,
where he was stationed with his family for several years before returning to
Leningrad. His job was to analyze data, and he had no involvement in other
activities. [Lynch, pp. 19-21] Contemporary American intelligence reports
confirm this fact. Indeed, this was one of the reasons that early on, during
1990 and 1991, Putin was considered a hopeful figure among the generation of
younger Russians by American intelligence sources.
After the fall of Communism during the administration of Boris
Yeltsin, he very briefly served at Yeltsin’s request as head of the FSB
intelligence service. But the FSB is not the KGB.
Lynch treats
in some detail the question of Putin’s supposed continued subservience to KGB
ideology, with particular reference to the events surrounding the abortive
Communist coup by the old hands at the KGB in August 1991. Putin, by that time,
had resigned his position in the KGB and was serving as deputy mayor to
pro-American Leningrad mayor, Anatoly Sobchak, one of the fiercest critics of
the KGB and the old Soviet system. It was Putin who organized the local
Leningrad militia to oppose the attempted KGB coup and protect Mayor Sobchak and the forces
of democratic reform:
Putin played a
key role in saving Leningrad for the democrats. The coup, which lasted but
three days, was carried out on August 19. That same day Mayor Sobchak arrived
on a flight from Moscow. The Leningrad KGB, which supported the coup, planned
to arrest Sobchak immediately upon landing. Putin got word of the plan and took
decisive and preemptive action: He organized a handful of loyal troops and met
Sobchak at the airport, driving the car right up to the plane’s exit ramp. The
KGB turned back, not wishing to risk an open confrontation with Sobchak’s armed
entourage [led by Putin].” [Lynch, p. 34]
This signal
failure in Russia’s second city doomed the attempted KGB coup and assured the
final collapse of the Soviet system and eventual transition of Russia away from
Communism. It was Vladimir Putin, then, who was largely responsible for defeating and preventing the return of
Communism in Russia. It is very hard to see how a secret supporter of the KGB
would take such action, if he were actually favoring the return of Communism.
As Professor Lynch recounts:
Putin accepted the irreversibility of the Soviet Union’s
collapse and came to terms with the market and private property as the proper
foundations of the Russian economy. [Lynch, p.28]
It is true
that Putin lamented the break-up of the old Soviet Union, but not because he regretted
the disappearance of the Soviets, but, rather, because of the numerous and
intimate economic, linguistic, social, and cultural connections that
interrelated most of the fifteen constituent republics of the old USSR. His
comments on the topic were very clear, but have been selectively taken out of
context by the Putin haters. [See the book-length interview with Putin, with
comments from other Russian leaders, First Person: An Astonishing Frank Self-Portrait by Russia’s
President Vladimir Putin, New York, 2000, pp. 165-190]
Much like the break-up of the Austro-Hungarian empire after
World War I, which left significant ethnic minorities cut off from their
historic former homelands — for example, millions of Austro-German Sudetens in
Czechoslovakia, Hungarian Transylvanians in Romania, etc. — and a number of
economically non-viable states in the Balkans, the dissolution of the Soviet
Union created the same situation in Eastern Europe. The present intractable
crisis in Ukraine is a clear example of what can happen and has happened as a
result. It was this situation that Putin rightly lamented; it was this break-up
that he foresaw correctly as a tragedy.
The much-criticized—by the American press—secession of Crimea
from Ukraine and its subsequent re-union with Russia clearly illustrates this.
What too many so-called “experts” in America fail to understand (or, if they
do, skillfully omit in their reports) is that Crimea was an integral part of
Russia for hundreds of years until Communist Nikita Khrushchev sliced it off
from Russia and gave it to Ukraine in 1954, despite the fact that 60% of its
population is ethnically Russian and its culture and language completely
Russian. [See the Wikipedia article, “Crimea”]
Moreover, the Ukrainian “oblasts,” or provinces, of Lugansk and
Donetsk, have a similar history and ethno-cultural make-up. They were
arbitrarily added to the Ukrainian socialist republic in the 1920s after the
Communist revolution, despite being historically part of Mother Russia for
centuries.
Interestingly, at the same time Putin made the “break-up” of the
Soviet Russia comment, he visited Poland to denounce and condemn the Communist
massacre and crimes in the Katyn Forest at the beginning of World War II, as
well as the horrid Soviet gulags. On more than one occasion, especially at the
meetings of the international Valdai Discussion Forum in 2013 and 2014, he has
harshly condemned in the strongest terms Communism and the atrocious crimes
committed by Communists. In so doing, he made extensive reference to Russia’s
Christian heritage (also criticizing same sex marriage, abortion, and
homosexuality as being “opposed to the most sacred values of our traditions”).
Putin’s
remarks at the Valdai Forum in September 2013, in front of representatives
from most European countries, deserve extensive quoting. Here is some of what
he said:
Another serious challenge to Russia’s identity is linked to
events taking place in the world. Here there are both foreign policy and moral
aspects. We can see how many of the Euro-Atlantic countries are actually
rejecting their historic roots, including the Christian values that constitute
the very basis of Western civilisation. They are denying moral principles and
all traditional identities: national, cultural, religious and even sexual. They
are implementing policies that equate large families with same-sex
partnerships, belief in God with the belief in Satan. The excesses of political
correctness have reached the point where people are seriously talking about
registering political parties whose aim is to promote paedophilia. People in
many European countries are embarrassed or afraid to talk about their religious
affiliations. Holidays are abolished or even called something different; their
essence is hidden away, as is their moral foundation. And people are
aggressively trying to export this model all over the world. I am convinced
that this opens a direct path to degradation and primitivism, resulting in a
profound demographic and moral crisis. What else but the loss of the ability to
self-reproduce could act as the greatest testimony of the moral crisis facing a
human society? Today almost all developed nations are no longer able to
reproduce themselves, even with the help of unlawful migration. Without the
values embedded in Christianity, without the standards of morality that have
taken shape over millennia, people will inevitably lose their human dignity. We
consider it natural and right to defend these values. One must respect every
minority’s right to be different, but the rights of the majority must not be
put into question.
And Putin
gained firm support and endorsement from that inveterate and most intransigent
anti-Communist, Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn. Before his death in 2008, Solzhenitsyn
praised Putin and stated that he believed Putin’s personal acceptance of
Christian faith to be genuine. American ambassador William Burns visited
Solzhenitsyn (April 2008) shortly prior to his death and quoted him as stating
that under Putin, the nation was rediscovering what it was to be Russian and
Christian. [See article atguardian.co.uk, Thursday, December 2, 2010]
The great Russian anti-Communist also gave a long 2007 interview with the German
magazine, Der Spiegel, saying the same thing. So, then, if the
Putin-haters are correct, did Putin fool the great Solzhenitsyn who was by far
the greatest and most intransigent anti-Communist of the 20 th century? Not likely.
About the personal corruption charge Lynch offers substantial
detail and discusses how it got going, basically spread by Putin’s liberal
opponents. To those who suggest that Putin stood to make a fortune off his
political choices, Lynch (and others) offers substantial documentation to the
contrary:
Putin was not corrupt, at least in the conventional, venal
sense. His modest and frankly unfashionable attire bespoke a seeming
indifference to personal luxury. While as deputy mayor. He had acquired the use
of the summer dacha of the former East German Consulate and even installed a
sauna unit there, but when the house burned down in the summer of 1996, his
$5,000 life’s savings burned with it. To have accumulated only $5,000 in five
years as deputy mayor of Russia’s second-largest city and largest port, when
hundreds of less well-placed Russians were enriching themselves on government
pickings, implies something other than pecuniary motives behind Putin’s
activities (….) In sum, Putin was honest, certainly by Russian standards. He
lived simply and worked diligently. Accused by a foe…of having purchased a
million dollar villa in France, Putin sued for slander and won his case in
court a year later. [Lynch, pp. 33, 35]
Some of the hostility towards Putin emerged when he became
interim president of the Russian Federation after Boris Yeltsin stepped down in
December, 1999. Putin had established himself as a loyal and forthright
political leader since serving as deputy mayor for the pro-democratic Mayor
Sobchak. He had also served Yeltsin faithfully.
But Putin was
no Yeltsin. While initially following the Yeltsin pro-American and pro-Western
lead in foreign policy, Putin was also aware that Russia was undergoing a
radical transition from a decrepit and collapsed Communist state to the
recovery of some of its older traditions, including a mushrooming, vibrant
return to traditional Russian Orthodoxy, a faith which he has publicly and
personally embraced. [See various confirming reports, including Charles Glover,
“Putin and the Monk,” FINANCIAL TIMES Magazine, January 25, 2013, and video clip. During the days of oppressive Communist rule, the Russian
Orthodox Church, at least the official leadership, was subservient to Marxism,
with many of its leaders at least mouthing Communist ideas, if not serving as
agents. The former Patriarch of the Russian Orthodox Church, Alexei (who died
in 2008), had been criticized as a collaborator with the Communist regime.
However, the so-called “intelligence proof” that suddenly “appeared” in Estonia
stating that he was a secret KGB agent has been placed in very serious doubt
(see Wikipedia, “Patriarch Alexei” article). Apparently, the “documents” were
most likely fabricated and not genuine. Indeed, as the Encyclopedia Britannica in its biography of him relates, Alexei was "the first
patriarch in Soviet history to be chosen without government pressure;
candidates were nominated from the floor, and the election was conducted by
secret ballot.” Not only that, after the fall of Communism, Alexei publicly
denounced Communist crimes and called for the freedom of Christianity in
Russia. It became something of a moot point when Alexei died in 2008; his
replacement as head of the Russian church was Archbishop Kirill, someone who is
known for his staunch opposition to Marxism and his defense of historic
Christianity and traditional morality.
As Russian
religious scholar Professor John Garrard exhaustively demonstrates in his
excellent study, Russian
Orthodoxy Resurgent (2008), from 1991 onwards the
Russian Orthodox Church began a necessary purification, with older
collaborators and Communist agents gradually stepping down or being removed.
Today the Russian Orthodox Church is, by far, the most conservative,
traditional and anti-Communist religious body in the world. It has gone so far
as to canonize dozens of martyrs killed by the Communists and celebrate the
Romanov tsar and his family who were brutally murdered by the Reds in 1918.
Significantly, since 1991 over 26,000 new Christian churches have opened in
Russia, and the fact that Christianity is being reborn in Russia has not gone
unnoticed among some Christian writers in the America and Europe, although
generally ignored by the secular press. [There are numerous articles and
reports chronicling this amazing rebirth, e.g., Russia has experienced a
spiritual resurrection, Catholic Herald, October 22, 2014; see also,
“Faith Rising in the East, Setting in the West,” January 29, 2014, Break Point Commentaries. Such a phenomena is not some Communist plot, but
represents a genuine desire on the part of the Russian people to rediscover
their religious roots, ironically just as a majority of American now seem to
embrace same sex marriage, abortion, and the worst extremes of immorality and
the rejection of traditional Christianity.
In support of
his goals Putin has championed Russian laws that: (1) have practically outlawed
abortion in Russia (no abortions after the 12 th week, and before that time in limited cases, and also the end of
financial support for abortions, reversing a previous Soviet policy); (2) clamp
down on homosexuality and homosexual propaganda---absolutely no homosexual
propaganda in Russian schools, no public displays of homosexuality, with legal
penalties imposed for violating these laws; (3) strongly support traditional
marriage, especially religious marriage, with financial aid to married couples
having more than two children; (4) have established compulsory religious
instruction in all Russian schools (including instruction in different
Christian confessions, in different regions of the country); (4) implement a
policy instituting chaplaincy in Russian military regiments (and religious
institutions now assist in helping military families); (5) have made religious
holidays now official Russian state holidays; (6) have instituted a nationwide
program of rebuilding churches that were destroyed by the Communists (the most
notable being the historic Church of Christ the Saviour in Moscow); and (7)
officially support the Russian film industry in producing conservative
religious and patriotic movies—interestingly, the most popular film in Russia
in 2009 was the movie “Admiral,” a very favorable biopic of the leader of the
White Russian counter-revolutionary, Admiral Aleksandr Kolchak, who was
executed by the Communists in 1920. The film was supported by the Russian cultural
ministry. Can we imagine the American NEH doing anything similar in the current
United States? [See reports, OneNewsNow.com, January 23, 2013; LifeSiteNews, October 26, 2011, August 1, 2013; Scott Rose, Bloomberg News, June 30, 2013; see also Garrard on some of these actions]
As American
Catholic author, Mark Tooley, has written Understanding a More Religious
and Assertive Russia, April 2, 2014:
Putin
has formed a close association with Russian Orthodoxy, as Russian rulers
typically have across centuries. He is smart to do so, as Russia has
experienced somewhat of a spiritual revival…. Orthodoxy is widely and
understandably seen as the spiritual remedy to the cavernous spiritual vacuum
left by over 70 disastrous, often murderous years of Bolshevism. Resurgent religious
traditionalism has fueled Russia’s new law against sexual orientation
proselytism to minors and its new anti-abortion law. Both laws also respond to
Russia’s demographic struggle with plunging birth rates and monstrously high
abortion rates that date to Soviet rule. Some American religious conservatives
have looked to Russian religious leaders as allies in international cooperation
on pro-family causes.
As the largest nation in the world, with historic connections to
the rest of Europe, but also to Asia, Putin understood as well that Russia,
despite the Communist interlude, was still a major power to be reckoned with. A
reawakened Russian conservative nationalism and a return to the traditional
Orthodox Christian faith did not, he initially hoped, predetermine an eventual
clash with the European Union nor with the United States.
Indeed, after the 9/11 attack on the “twin towers” in New York,
Putin’s Russia was the first nation to offer its full support to and its
cooperation with American intelligence agencies to combat terrorism and bring
the culprits to justice. Having combated Chechen Islamic terrorism in the
Caucasus region, Russia had experience dealing with Islamic extremism. [Lynch,
pp. 100-105; Stuermer, pp. 5-6]
Nevertheless,
Bush administration Neoconservatives basically kicked Russia in the teeth. With
their zealous belief in liberal democracy and global equality, to be imposed on offending nations if need
be ,as Allan Bloom once boasted,
they condescendingly refused Russian collaboration. As leading Neocon publicist
and “talking head,” Charles Krauthammer, expressed it, “we now live in a
unipolar world in which there is only ONE superpower, and that is the United
States.”
The Neoconservative condescension towards Russia, first after
9/11, then with the threatened placement of missiles in Poland, pushing NATO to
the very borders of Russia, and finally following the bungled American
diplomatic escapade in Georgia in 2008, cemented a conviction among Russians
and by Vladimir Putin that the desired partnership with America was
unrealizable, at least for the time being. [See Lynch, ch. 6, generally, for a
thorough discussion of Russian foreign policy; Stuermer, pp. 196-199]
The desire
for Russia to become a “collaborative partner” in any kind of situation
resembling international parity was just not acceptable to American Neocons.
Whereas Yeltsin had been welcomed in Washington as “America’s poodle,” willing
to do America’s bidding, Putin believed that the largest nation in the world,
which had thrown off the Communist yoke, merited a larger role. His desire was
for a real partnership. But aggressive attempts spearheaded by the United
States to incorporate formerly integral parts of Russia—areas that were and
continue to be considered within the Russian “sphere of influence,” even if
independent—into NATO, largely dashed Russian hopes for partnership with the
West. [Stuermer, pp. 191-196] In 1996 the late George Kennan cautioned the
American foreign policy establishment that expansion of NATO into those areas
“was a strategic blunder of potentially epic proportions.” Kennan warned
against a foreign policy that was “utopian in its expectation, legalistic in
its concept … moralistic … and self-righteous.” [Robert Sidelsky, Kennan’s Revenge: Remembering
the Reasons for the Cold War The Guardian, April 23, 2014, ] Henry
Kissinger echoed this warning on November 12, 2014, calling in Der Spiegel the American response to
Russia “a fatal mistake.”
Perhaps it is
no coincidence that many of the present-day Neocon publicists descend from
immigrant Jewish Labour Zionists and inhabitants of the Russian “pale of
settlement,” who experienced tsarist pogroms in the late 19 th century and who later formed
the vanguard of Marxist efforts to overthrow the tsar and establish a socialist
state? Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn’s mammoth study, Two Hundred Years Together (still untranslated into English, although a French edition
exists: Deux Siecles Ensembles,
1795-1995,
Fayard, 2002), offers fascinating detail on this process. The Socialist
internationalism manifested by those revolutionaries found its incarnation in
Leon Trotsky, murdered at Stalin’s orders in Mexico in 1940. Despite the
supposed migration of the Neocons towards the political Right in the 1970s and 1980s,
the globalist and “democratic” legacy of Trotsky remains a not-so-distant
lodestar for many zealous partisans.
At times this
paternal reverence continues to break forth, in unlikely sources. On National Review Online, a few years back, Neoconservative writer Stephen Schwartz
wrote:
To my last breath, I will defend
Trotsky who alone and pursued from country to country and finally laid low in
his own blood in a hideously hot house in Mexico City, said no to Soviet
coddling to Hitlerism, to the Moscow purges, and to the betrayal of the Spanish
Republic, and who had the capacity to admit that he had been wrong about the
imposition of a single-party state as well as about the fate of the Jewish
people. To my last breath, and without apology. Let the neofascists and
Stalinists in their second childhood make of it what they will.” [See Professor
Paul Gottfried's commentary onTakimag.com,
April 17, 2007]
For the American Neocons, the emergence of a nationalist,
Christian, and undemocratic Russia is perhaps too reminiscent of the “bad old
days.” And despite very different circumstances, a non-conforming Russian state
demanding any form of parity with the world’s “only remaining superpower” is
out of the question.
On the contrary, Boris Yeltsin was a Neocon favorite. Yeltsin’s
tenure as president seemed not only to echo a second-rate “America’s poodle”
status, his handling of the Russian economy proved disastrous for the average
Russian, but lucrative for a handful of Russian oligarchs, who in turn were
connected to American business interests. Wikipedia (article on Boris Yeltsin)
sums up his actions in this way:
In 1995, as Yeltsin struggled to finance Russia’s growing
foreign debt and gain support from the Russian business elite for his bid in
the early-1996 presidential elections, the Russian president prepared for a new
wave of privatization offering stock shares in some of Russia’s most valuable
state enterprises in exchange for bank loans. The program was promoted as a way
of simultaneously speeding up privatization and ensuring the government a
much-needed infusion of cash for its operating needs.
However, the deals were
effectively giveaways of valuable state assets to a small group of tycoons in
finance, industry, energy, telecommunications, and the media who came to be
known as “oligarchs” in the mid-1990s. This was due to the fact
that ordinary people sold their vouchers for cash. The vouchers were bought out
by a small group of investors. By mid-1996, substantial ownership shares over
major firms were acquired at very low prices by a handful of people. Boris Berezovsky, who controlled major stakes in several
banks and the national media, emerged as one of Yeltsin’s most prominent
backers. Along with Berezovsky, Mikhail Khodorkovsky, Vladimir Potanin,Vladimir Bogdanov, Rem Viakhirev, Vagit
Alekperov, Alexander Smolensky, Victor Vekselberg, Mikhail Fridman and a few years later Roman Abramovich, were habitually mentioned in the media as Russia’s oligarchs.
On his assumption of the presidency and his election to a full
first term, Putin resolved to end this economic domination by “the oligarchs,”
but in so doing, he antagonized their internationalist capitalist partners in
the West on Wall Street and in Bruxelles.
During his first term, Putin proved himself to be a clever and
resourceful politician. He organized a powerful political base, his United
Russia political party, and, like most successful political leaders, was able
to parlay his economic successes and a favorable conclusion to the Chechen
civil war into a strong base of support across the Russian Federation.
Criticized by some domestic opponents for not following punctiliously all the
hallmark benchmarks of Western-style “democracy,” Putin insisted that the
difficult path to Russian democracy was different than that so often pushed
(and imposed) by the United States around the world. Nevertheless, the average
Russian citizen experienced more real liberties and more economic freedom than
at any time in Russia’s long history, and the credit for that must be Putin’s.
[Lynch, pp. 69-74; Stuermer, pp. 199-200]
The continuing charges that Putin is corrupt and has surrounded
himself with ex-KGBers have as their origin, not surprisingly, leftist and
liberal domestic opponents of the Russian president in Russia, as Lynch, Paul
Craig Roberts, M. S. King, and others have shown. In fact, most of Putin’s
advisors lack serious earlier Communist/KGB involvement. The charges,
nevertheless, have been picked up by the Murdoch media and Neocon press. Just
as they had lauded Yeltsin, they quickly turned on the nationalist Putin, who
quickly became in the Western press a “KGB thug,” “corrupt,” and desirous of
“restoring the old Soviet Union.
One of the
major, if indirect, Russian domestic sources for the corruption charges came
via a prolific Russian politician, the late Boris Nemtsov. Nemtsov, identified
as a “new liberal,” was a longtime opponent of Vladimir Putin and a favorite of
John McCain and various “mainstream conservatives.” [See, "Russians React Badly to
U.S. Criticism on Protests," The New York Times, January 6, 2011] Over the years he penned a number of election
broadsides and pamphlets, charging Putin with everything from feathering his
own “nest” with “billions of rubles,” to election fraud. [See Nemtsov, Putin: What 10 Years of Putin
Have Brought,
2010] In each case, his allegations lacked the kind of sources to make them
creditable. It is as if Al Gore were to have written a pamphlet about George W.
Bush in the 2000 election: it and its content would immediately be highly
suspect.
That some supposedly conservative American publications and news
sources could give these accusations credence just demonstrates the power of
the liberal/left media and the international anti-Russian homosexual lobby who
have tried desperately to propagate such ideas.
Although the Nemtsov origin for the constant media barrage has been
important, in recent months the nature of the Western opposition to Putin and
Russia has been radically transformed. While Nemtsov’s canards certainly have
found their way into the Western press, since Russia’s legal prohibitions (in
early 2013) against homosexual propaganda (especially directed towards underage
children) and its forthright defense of the Christian institution of marriage,
the vigorous opposition to Putin has assumed a “moral” dimension, symbolized
best, perhaps, by Obama’s appointment of several over-the-hill, openly
homosexual athletes to head the United States delegation to the Sochi Olympics
in early 2014.
Such an action demonstrated both the fundamental rejection by
the American leadership (and Western European leaders) of Russia’s affirmation
of traditional marriage and traditional Christianity, while illustrating the
formal apostasy by the West from its own traditional Christian moorings.
Enter
Russian-American journalist and author Masha Gessen. Numerous references to
Gessen began to appear in recent years, and soon she was appearing as “the
Russian authority” on several of the Sunday morning news programs and as a
guest on the Establishment’s special programs dealing with Russia and Ukraine.
Repeatedly, she is identified as “the noted expert and author on Russia and
Vladimir Putin.” Her 2012 volume, The Man Without a Face: The
Unlikely Rise of Vladimir Putin, has been cited on PBS and on such programs as “Meet the Press”
and “Face the Nation” as critical to understanding Russia and its president.
She is the most widely-quoted writer on Russia and Putin now in the West.
But just who
is Masha Gessen? She is identified by the Wikipedia (not known for its right
wing bias) as a Jewish lesbian activist, with dual Russian and American citizenship (how did
she manage that?), who is “married” to another lesbian, with a “family,” but
who advocates the abolition of the “institution of marriage,” itself.
She has
identified herself as a violent opponent of Putin and of traditional
Christianity. Yet, her book, The Man Without a Face: The Unlikely Rise of Vladimir Putin, is held up as the best
volume on Russia and its president, while even her defenders (writing reviews
on Amazon.com, for instance, and elsewhere) admit that her study reads like
“one, long, impassioned editorial.”
Let us add
that Gessen is an unrelenting champion of the Russian lesbian punk rock band,
“Pussy Riot,” who profaned the high altar of one of the most sacred churches in
Russia, the Church of Christ the Saviour in Moscow. Her volume, Words Will Break Cement: The Passion of Pussy Riot (2014), is a passionate apologia for that pornographic lesbian
band and a vitriolic attack on both Putin and traditional Orthodox
Christianity, especially the institution of marriage, which Putin strongly and
publicly defends. Her attacks find their way into the whole spectrum of
American opinion, including, sadly, into supposedly conservative publications.
Indeed, many Neoconservatives are remarkably “soft” on issues surrounding homosexual
rights. [See, for example, “Fox News Goes Gay,” Christian Newswire, August 14, 2013; James Kirchick, “Out, Proud, and Loud: A GOP
Nominee Breaks Boundaries,” The Daily Beast, February 18, 2014; Andrew
Potts, “Fox News commentator Charles Krauthammer calls gay rights struggle
‘heroic’,” Gay Star News, January 1, 2014 ]
Gessen, then, has now become one major source for attacks as
well as the “analysis” spewed out by the major networks. As one can see, the
real key here increasingly is the issue of homosexuality and the fact that
Putin’s Russia defends traditional Christian ethics and has clamped down on gay
propaganda. Gessen finds this intolerable….thus, even though her journalistic
writing purports to take a researched and scholarly view of Russian affairs,
her attacks, the charges of corruption and anti-democratic tendencies, are all
subsumed into something much more important to this vocal activist: an
all-encompassing passion to advance homosexuality worldwide and an unremitting
opposition to traditional Christianity.
But it is not
just a prominent and influential publicist like Masha Gessen who identifies the
issue of homosexuality as central to the hatred for Putin and contemporary
Russia. Gessen’s views are now completely mainstream in the West, illustrated
resoundingly by President Obama’s naming of those gay former Olympians to
represent the United States at Sochi. The gesture was unmistakable, but its
symbolism indicated something more profound in the West’s post-Christian
mentality. Indeed, this salient aspect of what euphemistically is now called
“defending human rights” underpins EU and American policies towards Russia.
Such organizations as the Human Rights League, People for the American Way, and
the United Nations have gotten involved on a global level, cementing this template. In the international
political sphere, no clearer illustration of this pervasive influence on policy
may be found than in the response of close American ally German Chancellor
Angela Merkel to President Putin’s criticism of the collapse of traditional
Christian morality in America and Europe. As reported by The Times of London, November 30, 2014, Merkel,
who had for some time urged a softer approach to Russia and continued
negotiations, finally realized:
…that there could be no reconciliation with Vladimir Putin when
she was treated to his hardline views on gay rights. The German chancellor was
deep in one of the 40 conversations she has had with the Russian president over
the past year — more than the combined total with David Cameron, François
Hollande and Barack Obama — when he began to rail against the “decadence” of
the West. Nothing exemplified this “decay of values” more than the West’s
promotion of gay rights, Putin told her. It was then, said sources close to Merkel, that she realized Europe and America should abandon all hope
of finding a common language with the Kremlin and instead should adopt a policy
of Cold War-style containment….” [underlining added]
And Merkel is not alone. She joins Barack Obama and prime
ministers David Cameron, Francois Hollande, and the leaders of the EU in
expressing this important underlying rationale for Western policy towards
Russia.
It is, then, the formal Western and American embrace of
homosexuality, same sex marriage, and other deviations from traditional
Christian morality as normative that has opened a steep chasm and motivates
zealous proponents, for whom Vladimir Putin and a revived traditional Russia
present a distinct challenge to their eventual global success.
It is, then, this rebellion against God-created human nature and
against natural law, itself, that is bitterly opposed to Russia’s affirmation
of traditional religious belief. It is this divide now that forms the deepest
basis of the profound conflict between East and West. Indeed, the world has
been turned upside down, with Russia now defending Christianity, while the
American and Western political and media elites viciously attack it. As Patrick
Buchanan now rightly asks: “On whose side is God NOW on?”
_______________________________________________________________________
_______________________________________________________________________
Boyd D. Cathey holds a doctorate in European intellectual history
from the Catholic University of Navarra, Pamplona, Spain, where he was a
Richard Weaver Fellow, and an MA in American intellectual history from the
University of Virginia (as a Jefferson Fellow). He was assistant to
conservative author and philosopher the late Russell Kirk. In more recent years
he served as Registrar of the North Carolina Division of Archives and History.
He has published in French, Spanish, and English on historical subjects as well
as classical music and opera. He is active in the Sons of Confederate Veterans
and various historical, archival, and genealogical organizations. Small
sections of this article were originally published on the Communities Digital
News website, April 16, 2014.
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