With an all-but official declaration of a new “Cold War” on Russia by the United States, the journalistic atmosphere in the US, the EU and the exiting UK has become poisonous. Dissent is hardly permitted. All evils are now assumed to be the work of Moscow until proven otherwise, even by the most liberal of publications.
The US state has successfully pimped every hollow scribbler in the press and every brainless celebrity it can find to promote its foreign policy, word by word. The extent of such control is conspicuous and disturbing already.
Those of us who hold dissident perspectives towards our own governments are now under renewed pressure and censorship, accused of working for a foreign state. We are effectively sentenced to death by a chauvinist lynch mob approved by the US state and its (non-)Intelligence Community. Even US Green Party Presidential candidate Jill Stein has not been spared from this paranoid mob, with so-called Democrats trying to extract anti-Russian vows from dissidents and alternative political movements or they will be proclaimed as agents of the Kremlin.
Many anti-establishment figures, such as Owen Jones of the Guardian and even WikiLeaks’ Julian Assange, have gone on record offering a few anti-Kremlin comments as a pass so they can continue to be published, and avoid the wrath of hysterical lunatics combing the West for fifth-columnists. Others, more wisely, don’t recognize such paranoid accusations, and continue to appear in Russian-funded media to get away from the absurd statist goose-stepping of our “journalists” at home.
Here is how dissidents, such as my fellow Mont Order hoodies, should respond to such pressure. From the perspective of dissidents living in the UK, the US or other Western countries, we must make clear that Russia is absolutely irrelevant to our own lives. It is not the regime we are living under. The Kremlin has no designs on the West, except in paranoid delusions and fantasies that assert jingoist ideas about your own “country” being superior. And if the Kremlin did have designs on the West, we should be only happy. We should confess to that being a good thing, and we must challenge statists in our own countries to explain what they are defending.
Perhaps anti-Russian crusaders think it is noble to die for contaminated water caused by hydraulic fracturing (fracking), much the way they died to spread Agent Orange and cause cancer in Vietnam. Judging by the way some Democrats are accusing anti-fracking protesters of being Russian agents, it seems clear that this new Cold War defending American “freedom” is again going to have a lot to do with poisoning people and causing birth defects. It will also have a lot to do with accusing Russians of a few particular war crimes, while downplaying the US’s own endless and more monstrous war crimes in the Middle East.
Russia is accused of everything, and the people are denied any agency if anything happens against the US regime’s narrow interests. In the midst of all this excitement, the obvious question visited in this article is not being asked. What is the West fighting for? We know Russia is motivated by caution in the face of constant US military expansion, and is likely to counterattack US global dominance, but why is US dominance good? Specifically, why is US military dominance good enough that it is not only worth fighting for, but worth mass suicide on the part of the US and its allies in a hypothetical nuclear war with Russia? Criticize the Kremlin all you want, but are we prepared to die for this? Have we been so brainwashed to fight for the extremist view that the US regime must govern the world?
In the original Cold War, despite massive US wars and unprecedented human rights violations, the US regime at least articulated a belief that it was defending its own national security. The “domino effect” theory of the growth of revolutionary socialist states and insurgencies at least actually convinced many Americans of a threat to their lives, liberty and property.
Today, in this new global standoff with Russia, no attempt is even made to convince Americans that their life and liberty is at stake. Instead, political and humanitarian rhetoric are presented against Russia concerning such conflicts as Syria and Ukraine. These arguments are more aimed by politicians to snipe at one another than at the people.
The warmongering rhetoric on the part of the US regime and its allies is aimed at stifling dissent within the government itself, and trying to discredit individual politicians and officials who don’t conform. For all their talk of democracy, whatever the people cry out for is irrelevant to their calculus. It will be ignored, as it was in the 2003 Iraq War. No channel exists to protest in any effective way. The same phenomenon has gripped the mainstream media, with publications eager to give a platform to asinine ideas about confronting the enemies of the perfect “West” and refuse any commentary dissecting such absurdities.
Paranoia has been actively encouraged in all the press, with any revelation or comment damaging the credibility of the Western regimes now seen as “Russian” sabotage. In a country prone to mass chauvinism and the plucking out of one’s own eyes like the United States, it is like a death sentence if you proclaim someone as being influenced or backed by the Kremlin. The Kremlin, we are told, has “weaponized” everything, in particular facts that cast the US state in a negative light, and thus it is the patriotic duty of Americans to lie and distort facts to protect their information-shy state. Consider that only a few years ago, American liberals were the ones saying other governments are information-shy and couldn’t handle being exposed.
As far as the people need to be concerned, the British and American governments are fighting for nothing, and they will possibly sacrifice millions of people to charred fates in a nuclear war for nothing. Allow the obvious to be stated. The fraudulent claims about Western humanitarianism, democracy and freedom coming out of the mouths of US diplomats are not worth causing even one death, yet our politicians are ready to sacrifice everybody to such nonsense.
“Democracy” means something entirely different in US foreign policy than in actual political theory. Behind the hollow talk of democracy is torture, occupation, genocide, the suppression of civil and political rights, the assassination of civilians in their beds, and total surveillance over every aspect of every person’s life across the world. This deeply flawed and abusive regime, which imprisons more of its people than any other country, is heard endlessly promoting “freedom” at the United Nations when it won’t even support it in North America.
A true dissident who catches someone accusing critics of the state of being “Russian” agents will feel physically sick. They are like people with mouths full of dung. How can you respect someone with an opinion that is not really theirs, but they have been pimped to say it?
It is not possible to treat so-called liberals who make paranoid, xenophobic accusations about their opponents with any kind of respect. These people have dropped their masks, and have proven themselves to be reactionaries of the most toxic kind. They are dung-conveyors of the US state, trying to fill vacuous heads and shield this broken and paranoid state from the will of history.
For the US government to want to restart a Twentieth Century conflict speaks to the backwardness of its ideology, the shallowness of its claims, and the futility of its victory. It says nothing of any commitment to human rights, transparency or democracy, and speaks only to Nineteenth Century nation-state loyalty. Such empires of force and deception are pathetic if one takes a longer view of history. None of them are “exceptional”, and they all collapse eventually. If the United States is no exception, then its actions are not aligned with progress but with a pathetic denial of the will of history. Children today will grow up to see the US state and its futile ideology repudiated and thrown in the dustbin of history.
We must realize that the US government, in collusion with corporations, is a meddling, intrusive and world-molesting regime that already attracted millions of detractors who wanted the madness to end before Russia even began criticizing its policies. For all its reductionist talk of everyone being backed by Russia, the US regime’s real fear is that its hundreds of smaller avowed enemies and critics will eat it alive, bit by bit. Yes, we are the ones the “only superpower” really fears.