The Nation—left liberal organ—calls for coalition with Russia, rebukes Obama’s deep state maneuvering.

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READ HERE WHAT THE EDITOR OF THE GREANVILLE POST THINKS ABOUT THIS STATEMENT BY VANDEN HEUVEL AND COHEN.

Because of what it portends in terms of US politics at a critical juncture, TGP is reproducing in toto The Nation’s statement on US policy toward Russia and Syria, cosigned by its editor and publisher, Katrina Vanden Heuvel, and her husband, Russian studies specialist and historian Stephen Cohen.

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The Nation magazine represents the respectable left boundary of mainstream opinion in the US. As such, it is an organ read by many media creatures who regard themselves as “progressive” (a term we dislike as too vague and even cowardly at this point), not to mention a substantial segment of Democrats, many of whom, we suspect, are reluctantly but loyally following Hillary Clinton to the slaughterhouse in the name of that old phony obligation, the “lesser evil”.

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We don’t profess to know the precise origin of this shift by The Nation at the top editorial level. Maybe Vanden Heuvel and Cohen finally saw the  gravity of the crisis engulfing the US and humanity at large and decided something had to be done or else everyone—including those living at the top of the social pyramid—would be dragged into the planetary cataclysm engineered by the criminal, self-serving political choices embraced by US elites in their unrelenting pursuit of further riches and power. In coming to the fore with this statement, we hazard that Prof. Cohen did the larger share of the convincing, since while both are and remain solid establishmentarians, Vanden Heuvel has always been more deeply invested in the political ecology of the status quo than her husband.  In any case, whatever prompted them to prepare this editorial is a bit irrelevant at this point. They did it. And, besides, who’s to look a gift horse in the mouth?

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WEAKNESSES

[dropcap]F[/dropcap]or all its beneficial aspects, which we address below, the Vanden Heuvel/Cohen editorial has its weaknesses,  inherent in all liberal positions. For one thing (perhaps diplomatically) they place too much formal faith on Francois Hollande, as abject a Washington vassal as they come, a poster boy, along with his fellow European toads Cameron and Merkel, for US corruption of genuine European independence. Hollande and his nominal inclusion of Russia in an anti-ISIS coalition smells too much of a short-lived pirouette designed to fool the public, especially the French, into thinking that their nation is still willing to chart its own course. We believe, therefore (and we honestly hope we are proven wrong!), that he will soon drop any plans to tighten his ties with Russia and dutifully rejoin Washington’s phony war on ISIS whose goal remains the overthrow of Assad and the destruction and de facto federalisation of Syria.

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A second major gap in their exposition is the absence of a forthright denunciation of Washington’s longstanding project to destabilize the Middle East and other zones, the implementation of a neocon agenda of endless wars, and America’s direct responsibility for the creation and existence of the Jihadist nightmare, whether we call it Taliban, al Qaeda, Al Nusra, Boko Haram, or simply in its most brutal and ambitious incarnation, ISIS. That and America’s recklessly criminal war —by proxy (notably the Ukraine) and lately more direct—on Russia, and China, too, perceived by the Washington plutocratic mafia as upstart challengers to its accustomed unipolar supremacy. Overarching these serious but not disabling voids, we must also mention here that the document intrinsically turns a blind eye to the greatest enemy of humanity: US imperialism itself. Thus, Vanden Heuvel and Cohen declare at the outset:

The Islamic State (ISIS, ISIL, or Daesh) and its only “moderately” less extremist fellow jihadists are the most dangerous and malignant threat in the world today, having slaughtered or enslaved an ever-growing number of innocents from the Middle East and Africa to Europe, Russia, and the United States (is Boston forgotten?) and now declared war on the entire West.

This is a grand sleight of hand, the substituting of the symptom, however terrifying, for the ultimate cause. For if Washington and the US capitalist system erected the machinery that irrefutably created and sustains ISIS to this day, and which is pushing the world ever closer to a nuclear confrontation, it is they that should be regarded as the main threat to civilization and all planetary life. These hidden actors, protected by their own, filthy and enormous propaganda shield, should have been denounced in this document, put the mater on record, so to speak, but of course, if Vanden Heuvel and Cohen had denounced capitalism and its dynamic offshoot, imperialism, in such clear and forceful terms, they would have stopped being respectable liberals and crossed over to the camp of radicals, which apparently they are not prepared to do.  Hence their silence on this self-evident matter, at least for the well-informed.

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STRENGTHS 

[dropcap]A[/dropcap]n obvious benefit is that this statement is liable to be read by many in the so-called Western intelligentsia, the liberal punditocracy, and a fair number of people who regard the Democratic party as their political home.

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The latter includes—as noted earlier— a good number of self-complacent media worthies who desperately need some shaking, if not outright flogging in the public square, and if this document accomplishes even a fraction of that, it is a step in the correct direction.

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As lifelong, card-carrying liberals, extremists of the center, many of these people are too snotty politically and too shallow in their knowledge to listen to genuine voices of the left, which they are programmed in any case to dismiss as plain wrong-headed or irrelevant to the national debate. Liberals, as we know, are acculturated to seek “pragmatic” solutions to big problems caused by the capitalist system’s inexorable dynamic. This usually leaves all moral considerations out of the equation, which is supremely convenient for those who are in effect key accomplices to massive crimes in almost all spheres of human agency.

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But tweaking the symptoms, if that, without ever addressing the root causes of the disease is an exercise in self-delusion and intentional political negligence on a grand scale. In that sense, by speaking the truth about the necessity to recognize Russia’s expertise, courage and contributions to the anti-terrorist cause, The Nation is doing us all a favor, for by bringing such normally pariah notions to the mainstream, it punctures the Bubble’s official narrative on a critical meme.

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Perhaps the most invigorating part of Vanden Heuvel/Cohen’s editorial is their forthright (though belated) castigation of both Obama and Hillary, chief players in the criminal shenanigans of the reigning corporatist duopoly. Does this signal the birth of a subterranean fault in the liberal continent, a symbol of a possible decoupling from the still prevailing liberal fantasies that Democratic politicos can deliver true leadership in a system utterly dominated by money? Fissures on the surface may go deep or be mere transient manifestations of stress prefiguring a new accommodation, but without the stress they would never be there. Their denunciation of Obama’s shady charlatanism is spot on, something that should have been done years ago, before this world-class phony got to implement his many betrayals, still, these words will not be well received in many mainstream liberal precincts, from the whores at MSNBC and CNN who are still silent on his crimes, to the average clueless Democrat voter, especially his African American supporters, by far among his most perversely loyal and most abjectly betrayed of all constituencies.

Over the years, Obama has repeatedly treated and spoken of Putin in ways unbefitting the White House—and detrimental to US national security. He did so again after Paris. Putin told Hollande, “We are ready to cooperate with the coalition which is led by the United States.” Obama, however, who endorsed Turkey’s inexplicable shoot-down of the Russian warplane, used his press conference with the French president to again demean Putin and Russia’s contributions: “We’ve got a global coalition organized. Russia is the outlier,” adding condescendingly that Moscow might be permitted to participate, but only on US terms.

Yes, amen to that brother. As to the grand corporatist shill Hillary Clinton, a superb exponent of the family specialty of oily opportunism, The Nation has similar words of rebuke:

Like most of the Republican would-be presidents, Hillary Clinton continues to speak derisively about Putin’s leadership, insisting he “is actually making things somewhat worse.” Inexplicably, unless she wants war with Russia, she also continues to call for an “imposed” no-fly zone over Syria, which would mean attacking Russian war planes flying there daily. Strobe Talbott and John Bolton, each reportedly an aspiring secretary of state in the next Democratic or Republican administration, respectively, agree (uncontested, as usual, in the Times) that Putin’s Russia remains “part of the problem.”

Having said this much, The Nation has made it easier for the real left to get its own message heard in larger precincts normally hostile to such truths. For that, flaws and all, The Nation editors deserve our gratitude.— P. Greanville

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