Dispatches from Deena Stryker
As reported by CNN: “President Trump, asked by an interviewer on Saturday why he respected President Vladimir V. Putin of Russia even though he is “a killer,” seemed to equate Mr. Putin’s actions with those of the United States.
“You got a lot of killers,” he told the interviewer, Bill O’Reilly of Fox News. “What, you think our country’s so innocent? Mr. Trump has long expressed his admiration for the Russian leader’s strength. But his willingness to seemingly draw a moral equivalence to actions by Mr. Putin, who has brutally suppressed dissent by eliminating political enemies, led to an eruption on social media.”
If you think the president is simply telling it like it is, this morning on MSNBC, a former ambassador to Russia, the notoriously warmongering Neocon Michael McFaul — a regular on that channel — appeared to have forgotten the basics of diplomacy, saying: “All he cares about is getting along. That’s not a policy. What do I care whether we get along with Russia!”
The ‘no journalist-left-behind’ crowd has unanimously chastised the President by questioning his right to put the United States on the same footing as Russia. How can he, even in a moment of distraction, possibly suggest that the US, with its checks and balances, can possibly be compared to a country run by an putative autocrat — an ‘authoritarian’?
Yet this is what President Trump most admires in the Russian President: he sees to it that the Russian Parliament — the Duma — does what it’s told—of course, the Duma goes along (in their majority) because what Putin proposes is commonsensical and demonstrably beneficial for Russia. Not like here, where a ‘so-called judge’ can mess up a perfectly reasonable order to keep Muslims out. (‘A so-called judge’ can have a different meaning from the first one that comes to mind: it can imply that the judge is incompetent, no?)
Back to the snide ‘moral equivalency’ between Russia and the US, how many countries has Russia invaded since Putin became president in 2000? Zero. (He put down a separatist movement in Chechnya, then rebuilt the country.) Had he invaded Ukraine, as imagined by the feverish minds of Western journalists, his troops would have reached the capital, Kiev, in a day. President Putin did what any American president would have done under similar circumstances, offering aid and assistance to Russian speakers in eastern Ukraine who refuse to live under the neo-fascist regime that the US installed when it overthrew the elected President in 2014. (Ukrainian neo-fascists refer to Russians as cockroaches, and in May, 2014, they burned over a hundred of such “vermin” taking refuge in a trade union building during a protest.)
Since 2000, the year Bush II was elected, the US has waged war on Afghanistan (still on-going) Iraq (still on-going), Libya (reduced to chaos), Syria (on-going via Al Qaeda and ISIS proxies). Most recently, it has stood by while its ally, Saudi Arabia, used American weapons to bomb one of the poorest countries in the world, Yemen, because Shia Houthis are trying to take power there, supposedly putting at risk the Sunni-Wahhabi monarchy next door. (In his first foreign foray, President Trump ill-advisedly approved a Navy Seal raid on that country that resulted in an American casualty and the death of a young daughter of Anwar-al-Alaki, the US-born incendiary Muslim cleric that President Obama killed with a drone strike in 2011, killing his sixteen year-old son in the same manner two weeks later…).
Americans often hear about a well-known Russian journalist and human rights activist, Anna Politkovskaya, being assassinated in the elevator of her apartment building in 2006, but speculation as to why, in 2013, the car of American journalist Michael Hastings, who was working on an expose of Obama, caught fire and crashed into a tree at high speed never led to an enquiry.
The strange thing is that the same American journalists who accuse anyone who dare to put Russia and the US on the same moral level, routinely refer to American ‘war weariness’ — a nice euphemism which somehow manages to disappear from the discourse whenever it’s time to criticize Russia for imagined misdeeds. Why do they find it strange that a President who has promised that the US will no longer try to police the world should acknowledge that murderous policing?
Just as strangely, however, pro-peace journalists interviewed this morning about the deepening row over ‘moral equivalency’ wondered aloud what could be behind the rage against Russia. They seem clueless to the fact that insults and provocations are part of a deliberate campaign intended to eventually lead, by hook or by crook to an strategic defeat and takeover (sic) of the biggest country in the world, along with its mineral wealth, so that the US can remain not only morally superior but secure in its ‘full spectrum dominance’ of the world.
DEENA STRYKER, Senior Contributing Editor
Born in Philadelphia, Stryker spent most of her adolescent and adult years in Europe, resulting over time in several unique books, her latest being
CUBA: Diary of a Revolution, Inside the Cuban Revolution with Fidel, Raul, Che, and Celia Sanchez
America Revealed to a Honey-Colored World
A Taoist Politics: The Case For Sacredness
She began her journalistic career at the French News Agency in Rome, spent two years in Cuba finding out whether the Barbados were Communists before they made the revolution (‘Cuba 1964: When the Revolution was Young’). After spending half a decade in Eastern Europe, and a decade in the U.S., studying Global Survival and writing speeches in the Carter State Department, she wrote the only book that foresaw the fall of the Berlin Wall AND the dissolution of the Soviet Union (“Une autre Europe, un autre Monde’). Her memoir, ‘Lunch with Fellini, Dinner with Fidel’, tells it all. ‘A Taoist Politics: The Case for Sacredness’, which examines the similarities between ancient wisdom and modern science and what this implies for political activism; and ‘America Revealed to a Honey-Colored World” is a pamphlet about how the U.S. came down from the City on a Hill’.
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The U.S. has killed tens of millions of people since 1945 (US Has Killed More Than 20 Million In 37 Nations Since WWII | PopularResistance.Org https://popularresistance.org/us-has-killed-more-than-20-million-in-37-nations-since-wwii/), and its bloody foreign policy continues, including illegal wars of aggression, violent overthrows of elected governments, coups, fixed elections (CIA has interfered with over 81 foreign elections in the past century http://www.hangthebankers.com/cia-interfered-foreign-elections-past-century/), has more than 800 military bases in more than 80 foreign nations and has Special Forces teams operating in more than 130 nations, all to advance U.S. corporatism and global hegemony. The U.S. has been notorious for military coups and regime change… Read more »