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Imperialism and Anti-imperialism Collide in Ukraine (Part 6)
Why is the United States so hostile, bellicose, and determined to engage Russia in a war? Searching for clues to answer the question necessarily leads to decode how U.S. ruling circles debate and adopt anti-Russian policies. Could clinical psychology—e.g., irrational, mortal fear of the Russian power—be a factor? No. Although it could be used in petty competitive settings, psychology is subjective and has no place in international politics. Further, one can play psychology but cannot avoid being trapped in it. Further, Politics, be domestic or international, is an open arena for rational processes and decision-making. Could it be then that tangible imperialistic motives are what we are looking for? Yes. Based on documented history, America’s anti-Russian hostility is designed and manufactured for the purpose of empire and domination.
Two traits define this hostility. (a) How the United States views itself in crafted ideological terms aggrandizing itself and role in the world, and (b) how it views Russia through the same lens. Simply, American ideologues and policy makers have been consistent in viewing Russia as a formidable, untenable, and non-negotiable foe presenting a structural incompatibility with their global domination project. Aside from hyper-militarized capitalism, and entities interconnected by interests and mutual promotion such as the military industry, all satellite and service industries, political class, interventionists, ideologues of empire, other important factors are primary instruments in defining and amplifying that view. A few examples include:
- Historically developed and encouraged ideology based on military strength and sheer domination as a path to empire is a factor. Karl Rove (a supremacist political theoretician typifying the fascist American system, and a senior advisor to George W. Bush) synthesized the basics of that ideology as follows:
We’re an empire now, and when we act, we create our own reality. And while you’re studying that reality — judiciously, as you will — we’ll act again, creating other new realities, which you can study too, and that’s how things will sort out. We’re history’s actors … and you, all of you, will be left to just study what we do. [sic]
- With the exception of a different political system and a new national identity, post-independence American ruling classes and population remained essentially British. The new Americans inherited language, culture, attitudes, mentality, criminal bent, ideology, and morbid lust for bloody colonialist expansions. In short, royal Britain was the inspiring and guiding matrix for the American republic, its worldview, and its philosophy of power. The point: the utter ugliness and cynical criminality of the British model of colonialism, imperialism, racism, and ideology of domination had become American. (Was it not a British novelist (Rudyard Kipling) who inspired and suggested to the United States to build a “recycled British empire” with his “The White Man’s Burden”?)
- The Zionization of the United States is a subject by itself, and goes beyond the scope of this work. Suffice to say, from Harry Truman onward, the rise to power of American Jewish Zionists (and their American Israel Public Affairs Committee, and myriad other organizations) have added new dimensions to the U.S. imperialist system. They pushed it to the path of no return—so far—on all matters of foreign policy and wars. The formula behind this push is intuitive. The more the United States aggressively and militarily engages the world, the more Israel becomes the direct beneficiary and controller of the imperialist state via American Zionists.
- Limited cultural literacy: simply stated (but without generalizing), in the United States, ruling classes and society, are clueless—by choice, by careers, and by indoctrination—about how the world works. Said differently, encouraged, cultivated, and socially accepted ignorance is what defines the United States despite positive results in many areas.
Molly Boigon (producer and reporter for Learning Curve) gave a tiny glimpse on the degradation of the American culture with her taking on the widely spread practice of hoaxes and the messages they convey. To make sure, hoaxes are manifestations of mass culture—especially when coupled to political schemes. She opens her article, “The Great Bamboozle: How America Has Become the Land of the Hoax “with these words,
“From Pizza gate to Rachel Dolezal, “A Million Little Pieces” to “Love And Consequences,” fake Indians to fake Holocaust survivors, the United States has a past rife with hoaxes, and likely, a history peppered with them, too.”
On academic level, philosopher Alan Bloom gave an impressive appraisal of the abysmal status of the American political culture with his book, The Closing of the American Mind (1988). And before I forget, I must add William J. Lederer’s remarkable work, A Nation of Sheep published in 1961
Statement: the American system thrives on all possible means to advance its world agenda. Remark: considering its devious and corecitive mechanisms of control, domestically and internationally, it is quite easy to understand the basic condition pitting the United States against Russia. By taming and indoctrinating the American crowds on how to view Russia, China, Arab states, Korea, Iran, Israel, South Africa, etc., U.S. ruling circles have succeeded at creating fertile but dangerous grounds for a global U.S. imperialist agenda with little, if not existent, domestic opposition.
To see how all this plays in the U.S. political processes, consider the following event. In a Senate hearing held on January 24, 2000 to discuss so-called “Russian Threats to United States Security in the Post-Cold War Era”, a passage from the transcript solemnly declares:
“Russia continues to be our top security concern, even without the adversarial relationship of the cold war. Russia still possesses 20,000-plus nuclear weapons. Wide-spread corruption and the absence of honest and accountable internal governmental administrative functions threatens Russia’s slow and erratic evolution toward democracy.” [sic]
Paragraph Analysis
- The Sentence, “Russia continues to be our top security concern, etc.”: the statement confirms my repeated assertions that the U.S. enmity toward Russia has nothing to do with Communism, but all to do with Russia’s status—old and new—as a great power standing in the way of its imperialist expansions, unilateralism, and hegemonic agendas.
- The Sentence, “Russia still possesses 20,000-plus nuclear weapons,”
- First, did the Senators and Reps expect Russia to disarm just because it changed from Communism to capitalism? In other words, did the legislators of that time expect Russia to disarm unilaterally while they continue keeping their offensive capabilities intact?
- Second, as per Wikipedia, in 2000, the United States had 8,360 nuclear weapons, and Russia had 21,500. The number of weapons is irrelevant in relation to the issue whether the country with the most is a threat to another with a lesser number. On this subject, if Russia was a threat to the U.S., so was the opposite, i.e., the United States was equally a threat to Russia. Besides, countless factors including size, multiple heads, load, trajectory, time of travel, etc. determine the equivalency of destructiveness thus rendering the count of weapon of no use.
- Third, while the gathering was focused on the number of Russian warheads to make impression, someone has “forgotten” that the USSR was defending a huge lands mass in Europe and Asia while confronting American, British, and French nukes near home, and, at the same, deterring potential American surprise attack from continental USA and its nuclear submarines around the oceans.
- Fourth, by mentioning only Russian weapons without disclosing the U.S. number of weapons or other capabilities, the 106th Congress was playing a trite game in highlighting a hypothetical Russian threat while obscuring the American side of the equation.
- The Sentence, “Wide-spread corruption and the absence of honest and accountable internal governmental administrative functions threatens Russia’s slow and erratic evolution toward democracy”. [Sic]
Here we go. Whenever the United States wants to inveigh against a foreign state, it resorts to the inferior gizmo of psychological projection. Russia is everything bad, but the United States is everything good—as if U.S. rulers and society are honest, accountable, inerratic, and unbending practitioners of democratic rules.
To close, the hearing is a testimony that U.S. hostility toward Russia is structural and ideological, fixed and repetitive to tedium. Keeping that in mind, it does not take much convincing to state that Russia is being targeted not because of its Russian-ness. The cause is different and dialectical: Russia is standing in the way of U.S. military-hegemonic onslaught on all nations out of its control. Otherwise, why is all this fanfare and opposition to Russia’s role and place in the international system?
What I just cited is a minuscule story in the annals of U.S. history concerning Russia. However, since 2000 through present, things have not changed in the United States, but gradually changed in the rest of the world. In 2001, George W. Bush, a fascist hyper-imperialist, ushered his freaky world vision with these words: “You Are either with Us, Or with the Terrorists”. In 2024, Blinken, Nuland, and Biden keep shouting, insulting, and blistering but no one listens. What happened? And, how Ukraine became the watershed for the crumbling of U.S. hyper-imperialism?
To recap, starting with Barack Obama, U.S. mechanisms to subjugate Russia, China, Iran, North Korea, Venezuela, Cuba, Arab nations, and any other nation resisting surrender to the U.S. diktat have finally reached their operational limits and started jamming. Signs of irreparable structural failure in the U.S. grip of the world were everywhere. Examples include Trump’s failure to disarm North Korea, Biden and Trump’s failure to vanquish Iran, their failure to make China and Russia “cry uncle” with sanctions and threats, their failure to save the dollar from unstoppable decline in world trade, and the failure of their Zionist wars in the Middle East—directly or via Israel.
In historical perspective, what were the signs that Russia was unstoppably breaking free from the chains that tied it to the U.S. imperialist wheel since the fall of the Soviet Union? How did Ukraine become the unintended theater for changes that no one has ever anticipated? Although Russia had almost surrendered to the United States during the Yeltsin years and the early Putin years (the proposal that Russia joins NATO), the powerful sign that it was so protective of its sovereignty can be attested to by one salient fact. It refused to dismantle its entire nuclear arsenal and national defensive structures—as demanded by the United States immediately after the breakup of the Soviet Union.
After the fall of the USSR (1991), U.S. planners focused on disarming Russia. The first target was the dismantlement of its nuclear capabilities. When that failed, the focus shifted to transform it into a vassal. The method was all too familiar American scheming: use pro-American Russians—with Americans in advisory roles—to model Russia’ new character according to America’s plans. The gamut was long; it included the composition of new political elites, capitalistic mode of production, finance, pro-U.S. foreign policy, and control of Russia’ military assets. But when this enterprise stalled under Vladimir Putin’s first presidency, and when Russia began recovering its independent international role, the U.S. reverted to its erstwhile confrontational strategy: opposing Russia as a state, nation, polity, and geography.
In summary, U.S. conduct vs. Russia is not happenstance. It has roots, motives, and it moves according to preset objectives. Knowing the details of this conduct is the path to unravel the knots surrounding the ongoing events in Ukraine. In particular, U.S. hostile posture toward post-Soviet Russia did not come out of nowhere. It is a culmination of a long anti-Russian history. As I stated, while this posture is no longer about the struggle between capitalism and communism, the United States updated its purpose to include confrontational policies in the pursuit of chimerical global empire under its unilateral control.
On one side, this new struggle is related intricately and ideologically to the imperialist making of the United States and its global projection. On the other, it is materially tied to how it wants to portray and treat Russia. To recap, after the dissolution of the USSR, Russia continued to be a nuclear superpower, it declined to be a U.S. vassal, and it recovered from the disastrous years of Boris Yeltsin. The rest is a known history. After carving its own independent path in the world, Russia is now facing, technically alone, formidable challenges including:
- Fend off attacks from U.S.-directed Ukraine,
- Prepare for a possible U.S. nuclear strike,
- Nullify U.S. efforts to surround it with nuclear weapons,
- Nullify U.S. military advantage through NATO,
- Watching out for aggressive moves by Britain, France, Germany, and Poland,
- Nullify the effects of economic sanctions and seizing of assets ,
- Terminate U.S. unipolarism in world affairs.
A question: what does it mean when an independent Russia (and China) stands in the way of U.S. quest for unopposed control of the planet? The answer is spontaneous: conflict will ensue. Thus far, it seems that neither Russia nor China is inclined to bargain for co-sharing in world domination under the wings of the American empire—they never sought such an aim in the first place. Besides, it would be a frivolous bribery. In addition, Russia and China–through words and deeds–respect the world and the inherent rights of all nations to be secure and prosper without U.S. sermons, warnings, or threats of war.
Russia’s independence from U.S. blackmail has predictable consequences, though. By failing to subdue Russia, the United States went back to square one. That is, driven by dreams of universal control, by entrenched imperialist violence, and by the arrogance of military power, the United States reprised its strategic fixation to defeat Russia. Some armchair ideologues have even suggested that the United States has the capability of taking on both Russia and China at the same time. And another just stated the other day, “The United States must prepare for possible simultaneous wars with Russia and China by expanding its conventional forces.”
Since the end of WWII, the U.S. has mobilized vast arrays of tools to zoom on and destabilize Russia. Anti-Russian films, TV shows, videogames, parodies with heavy Russian-accented English, books, news agencies, mass media, essays, policy statements, academia, congressional resolutions, national security strategies, presidential executive orders, military alliances, and even comic publications have all transformed Russia into a villain for all times.
As a reminder, the core of the Soviet Union was Russia. But when the USSR collapsed, Russia didn’t. Its national purpose and statehood identity remained intact. Having failed to destabilize, contain, or make Russia collapse in over 105 years (since 1917) of strenuous attempts, the United States is at it again by using the Ukraine conflict as a springboard toward that end.
To summarize, weakening, cancelling Russia’s presence in the world, planning to partition, or even destroying it in some way remains an irrepressible U.S. coveted desire. Key point: U.S. morbid hostility toward Russia did not come about the day after the intervention—it predates it by decades. Next, I shall address four pertinent examples.
Example 1: in her article: “From 1945-49 the US and UK planned to bomb Russia into the Stone Age,” Ekaterina Blinova, a freelance Russian journalist, vigorously addressed the issue of U.S.-British hostility toward Russia. She writes:
Interestingly enough, then British Prime Minister Winston Churchill had ordered the British Armed Forces’ Joint Planning Staff to develop a strategy targeting the USSR months before the end of the Second World War. The first edition of the plan was prepared on May 22, 1945. In accordance with the plan, the invasion of Russia-held Europe by the Allied forces was scheduled on July 1, 1945. The plan, dubbed Operation Unthinkable, stated that its primary goal was “to impose upon Russia the will of the United States and the British Empire. Even though ‘the will’ of these two countries may be defined as no more than a square deal for Poland, that does not necessarily limit the military commitment. [Emphasis added]
Example 2: U.S. Department of State (Office of the Historian) published a document entitled, United States Relations with Russia: The Cold War: 1945–1949. The relevant part of the document was a reference to a telegram sent by the anti-Soviet, anti-Russian, and anti-communist George Kennan. Here is an extract of how Kennan initiated what has become official U.S. hostility to Russia:
On February 22, 1946, George F. Kennan, the chargé d’affaires at the Moscow Embassy, sent a long telegram to the Department of State detailing his concerns about Soviet expansionism. Kennan argued that the United States would never be able to cooperate successfully with the Soviets, because they saw the West as an enemy and would engage in a protracted battle to limit Western power and increase Soviet domination. Kennan argued that the United States should lead the West in “containing” the Soviets by exerting counterforce at various geographical and political points of conflict. Kennan published a public version of this argument in the July 1947 issue of the journal Foreign Affairs. Kennan’s articulations of the policy of containment had a major influence on American foreign policy toward the Soviet Union”.
Comment
- Kennan talks about Soviet expansionism. This is remarkable—sarcastically, of course. Was he aware of how the United States of the 13 colonies situated on the East coast of the Atlantic Ocean had expanded all the way to the Pacific and to Hawaii? Did anyone inform him how President James Polk annexed Texas and the way with which he took control of the Mexican Cession?
- He said that the “United States would never cooperate with the Soviets, because they saw the West as enemy”. Fact: it was the other way around. The United States saw Russia, the USSR, and Communism as enemies after the triumph of the Bolshevik Revolution in 1917. That revolution was a great revolutionary experiment in social change and re-distribution of wealth—all of which are anathema to U.S. capitalists and imperialists. That the experiment had failed is another story.
- The core of Kennan’s hostility toward Russia was inserted along these lines: Russia “Would engage in a protracted battle to limit Western power and increase Soviet domination.” Well! So, it is okay if the United States increases domination and limit the power of the Soviet Union. Essentially, Kennan wanted that the United States to be the sole power having the right to dominate.
- As for the proposal to “contain” Russia, his exhortation has become eventually the daily Gospel in Washington until the end of so-called Cold War. However, “Containment” is now re-appearing regularly in U.S. and European media.
The full text of telegram (861.00/2 – 2246) is a synthesis of how U.S. political psychopaths think of Russia. How they see history. How they see the world through the narrow pinhole of ideology and indoctrination. How they construct a self-serving alternative reality and thereafter manufacture responses to it. (The study of this telegram goes beyond the scope of this work)
In example 3 and 4, next, I shall discuss the making, workings, and adoption of the U.S. anti-Russian ideology.
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