CAITLIN JOHNSTONE—And what’s interesting is that these same facts could have remained exactly as they are and allowed the exact opposite narrative to be constructed. If her plutocratic owners had wished it, Rachel Maddow would have spent every night over the last two years warning everyone that Donald Trump is taking dangerous actions against Russia that threaten to wipe all life off the face of the earth, and it would have worked. If Trump had continued making these escalations in our hypothetical alternate timeline while the mass media was constantly selling the “Trump’s going to get us all killed in a nuclear war with Russia” narrative, all the same blue-checkmarked Twitter pundits you see yelling at Tulsi Gabbard today would be yelling about the dangers of nuclear war in our alternate timeline.
READ ONCategory: RUSSIA DESK
Is Russia Imperialist?
STANSFIELD SMITH—It is only in military weight that Russia shows its power, but this by itself fails to make it an imperialist according to Lenin. Nor does it make Russia imperialist even in the pre-capitalist imperialist manner of ancient Rome, which required military expansion and slave labor. While Russia’s significant military might, especially its nuclear arsenal, makes it difficult for the imperialists to push around, Russia does not invade and bomb countries across the globe as the U.S. does, or even as second-rate imperial powers like Britain and France do.
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Grover Furr: Digging up the truth about Stalin
Distinguished educator and author Professor Grover Furr discusses his research into the Stalin-era and the challenge that recent scholarship poses to the Cold-War and anti-communist interpretations of Soviet History.
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Gilbert Doctorow—The Kremlin’s Military Posture Re-considered: strategic military parity with the U.S. or absolute military superiority over the U.S.
GILBERT DOCTOROW—However, it is also possible to see the Kremlin announcement as presaging Russia’s taking absolute strategic military superiority over the United States, i.e., appropriating to itself what it accuses the United States of having tried to achieve vis-à-vis Russia with encirclement and the move of NATO to Russian borders.
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