Assange: Still Enjoy Crushing Bastards

Julian Assange: 'I still enjoy crushing bastards'

di Stefania Maurizi

... Whenever he appears in public, people often notice his pale skin, and the long beard that  diminishes his young computer geek look, but few grasp the strong determination of this man, who replied in 2010, to the German weekly “Spiegel” when asked why he had not chosen to use his computer skills to make money and pursue a more comfortable path rather than invest his talent in a risky endeavour like WikiLeaks: « I enjoy helping people who are vulnerable. And I enjoy crushing bastards». Five years after "Collateral Murder", “l'Espresso” asked Julian Assange if he has changed his mind.

WikiLeaks has exposed the most powerful entity in the world: the US military-industrial complex and that complex has spent the last five years striking back with a neverending investigation against you and your staff. What do we know for certain about this US investigation?
«This year the US Department of Justice and the court system have said publicly that the investigation continues. We also obtained warrants from Google about our journalists and Google has said that they are still under gag order for many more, there are other companies that are similarly gagged. This year the offenses that the Department of Justice is attempting to apply were also revealed and they are: espionage, conspiracy to commit espionage, the violation of the Computer Fraud and Abuse Act, which is computer hacking or illegal transformation of data, theft of government data and general conspiracy. That's where we are formally. This is absurd. It is outrageous. This investigation is believed to be the largest ever investigation  into a publisher, the US government in its own internal communications referred to it  as “a whole of government investigation”, and Australian diplomats communicating to the Australian government what the US had told them in Washington DC said that the investigation was of “unprecedented scale and nature”».

What is striking is the stark difference between the cases of WikiLeaks, Chelsea Manning and Edward Snowden and the case of general David Petraeus, the former head of the Central Intelligence Agency, who passed top secret information to his mistress. You, Manning and Snowden are confined, in prison, in exile, respectively, for publishing secret information in collaboration with worldwide media, whereas general Petraeus is free as the air: no serious consequences for him...
«There is not any pretense anymore that there is equality before the law. Dianne Feinstein, the head of the US Senate Intelligence Committee, continuously says that I should be prosecuted for espionage, and pushes strongly for that, however she also says that general Petraeus and his family has suffered enough because he lost his job. This is a significant double standard. It demonstrates their lack of accountability. It is part of the calculation of having power to project power, and one of the ways to project power is to show that you are unaccountable: we are untouchable, so don't try to touch us. That is one of the reasons why they have aggressively gone after WikiLeaks, Snowden and Manning, because we hit them pretty hard and that makes them look very weak».

WikiLeaks experienced also a devastating extrajudicial banking blockade. The blockade and the neverending investigation are two of the methods used by the Western world to deal with organisations threatening the interests of the powerful. In Western democracies, journalists and activists are rarely killed: they are rather marginalised or silenced through legal and economic pressure. This is very bad, but quoting Chelsea Manning, “it is better than disappearing in the middle of the night”, as it happens in many regimes. Isn't it?
«I used to say that the way things work in the West now is  journalists are not taken from their homes in the middle of the night, but rather homes are taken from journalists in the middle of the day, by making sure that they are fired by their employer or that they are litigated. In the United States and in the West broadly, there are many ways to shut up journalists that do not involve killing them, many ways to dilute, not necessarily censor, but to dilute out of existence, the impact of their publication. The matrix of relationships in which powerful organisations and people are embedded such is that it is quite hard to disturb those relationships through publishing».

In a famous interview you declared that at the beginning, when you established WikiLeaks,  you thought that your biggest role would be in China and in some former Soviet states and in North Africa. Why aren't people in China, Russia and North Africa leaking to WikiLeaks?
«I knew that our most difficult conflict would be with the United States, from the very beginning. I knew that because the United States' military sector alone is about 50 percent of the entire world's [military sector], it is the most technically advanced, so it makes most secrets, and it also has an ideological incoherency presenting itself as believing in certain values, but then acting against those values, which produces internal dissidents, like Manning and Snowden. Now, we have done important work on China, Africa, and many countries, but ultimately we are, unfortunately, limited by resources. In order to properly engage with a culture you need a significant staff that speaks the language of that culture, and you need to be involved in the national debate of that culture. You need to be perceived as a player. We occasionally do manage to inject our resources into a country: an interesting example is East Timor, where we revealed a number of assassination plots and corruption deals and we became to be perceived as players in East Timor. But to be continuously perceived as a player in big cultures like China or Russia, you need significant investments in the languages of those countries».

Would you publish Russian and Chinese secrets with the same fearless determination?
«Yes. We have published serious documents about China in Chinese language. That was quite important material, politically effective in preventing a state-mandated censorship backdoor which was going to be included in every computer issued in China».

In the last two weeks there has been an important development about the Swedish case against you: the Swedish prosecutor finally accepted to question you in this Embassy as you always requested. If the Swedish case collapses, are you confident that you can leave the Embassy and go to Ecuador to enjoy asylum?
«Unfortunately the asylum in this embassy has never been about the “preliminary investigation” in Sweden, it is in relation to the United States case, and Scotland Yard has publicly stated that they would arrest me regardless».

Why?
«Well, it is a bit unclear. They also refused to confirm or deny whether the US has already submitted a secret extradition request, which is suspicious».

So basically it is not clear that if the Swedish case collapses you can leave this Embassy at all...
«It is clear it won't make any difference, except a political difference, but the political difference is quite important. To anyone who has looked at the details, the Swedish preliminary investigation is  a judicial scandal: it has been used to divert attention from the case that started first and has most serious implications: the US espionage case».

You described your life inside this embassy as living inside a space station. What is your typical day? Provided that there is a typical day in the life of Julian Assange...
«I hope not to have a typical day. Like all people who are in a form of detention, monotony is the enemy, and sensory deprivation is a serious problem. Fortunately we are going on with publication and running a combative mutinational investigative publisher. I am able to live, at least intellectually, not only inside these walls, but in several different countries at once».

What did you miss most living inside four walls?
«People want me to say that I missed all sorts of things, but I am just going to say that I miss my family and otherwise I did not miss anything else, because the demands of dealing with our struggles requires intense focus, so it is hard to think about my own difficulties. That is a good thing».

You always refused to talk about your children and family for security reasons. Did they ever ask you to reconsider your work?
«Yes. But they accepted it. They do not have a choice, actually [he smiles with a self-irony attitude]. It has been very hard on some people who are close to me, including my children: they didn't fully agree to live in such a life. On the other hand, situations like these are part of who I am, I think I am doing things that my children will ultimately be proud of and can learn from in a healthy way».

See a Film about Julian Assange: Underground. The Story of Julian Assange. (2012)
Original Source: Here. | ws

Chomsky: On Institutional Stupidity

Articles

Noam Chomsky on Institutional Stupidity

In January Noam Chomsky received the Philosophy Now Award for fighting stupidity.

Rick Lewis’s Introduction:

Welcome to the 4th Philosophy Now Award for Contributions in the Fight Against Stupidity. I’m delighted to say that we’re giving this year’s award to Professor Noam Chomsky.
Stupidity comes in many forms. Generally it is easier to spot when other people are being stupid and harder to notice when we ourselves are being stupid, in the sense of relying on unexamined assumptions, entrenched mental habits or poor reasoning. Yet we’re all guilty of these sometimes. Trying not to fool ourselves in these ways is central to philosophy.
So how can Chomsky help us with this? One of the world’s best-known intellectuals, he first gained fame for his work as a linguist, and in particular for his theory that we have an in-born or ‘innate’ grammar that underlies all of the world’s natural languages. He has gone on to do important original work on many other topics, including machine translation, logic, philosophy, and the nature of the media. A tireless social commentator, he also does a great deal of highly controversial political activism.
We want to give the Against Stupidity Award to Noam Chomsky not for his activism, for Philosophy Now does not take positions on political issues, nor for his fascinating early work on innate grammar, but mainly for his work on the structure of the media, and for his continual incitement to independent critical thinking. In their 1988 book Manufacturing Consent, Chomsky and his co-author Edward S. Herman examined various institutional biases that affect the media worldwide. Chomsky followed this up with related work such as his 1991 book Media Control: The Spectacular Achievements of Propaganda.
Immanuel Kant said our experiences depend not only on the nature of the external world but also on our perceptual apparatus and our mental categories. There is the phenomenal world, the world as we experience it, and there is the noumenal world, the external world as it actually is, which we can never fully know.
Chomsky’s project is in some ways reminiscent of Kant’s. It examines how we gain knowledge of the social and political worlds. The world is very big, so you can’t be an eyewitness to most of what goes on in it and instead have to find out about it through intermediaries, in digested form. It’s because they are intermediaries that we call them the media. But in reporting the news they first have to decide what is newsworthy, and how to report it. In authoritarian countries this process is subject to censorship that is often obvious and sometimes brutal. Chomsky argues that news reporting is shaped by powerful interests in capitalist democracies too, though in ways that are far less apparent. In Manufacturing Consent, Chomsky and Herman argue that the selection and presentation of news in the West is subject to five ‘filters’. The first is ownership (the giant conglomerates that now own much of the world’s media have wide commercial interests and tend to discourage reporting that will undermine those interests). Secondly, they rely on selling advertising, and will tend to exclude reporting which conflicts with the ‘buying mood’. Thirdly, given finite editorial resources they all rely on news stories from outside organisations including the press departments of government and commercial bodies, and are often unwilling to alienate those sources. Fourthly they are constrained by the desire to avoid ‘flak’, in other words hostile reactions to news stories. Fifthly, they operate under ideological constraints – in the past, anti-communism, and now the war against terror. Chomsky and Herman also present statistical analysis of the reporting of different kinds of stories, to test the validity of their model. If we take the news we read at face value without considering the forces that shape it, we may be fooling ourselves. If we understand those mechanisms, then we can also take them into account and maybe gain a clearer understanding of the world itself.
Chomsky as a social critic constantly questions public policy and the presentation of the news. He asks hard questions and even when you disagree with him, forces you to justify your thinking about society and values. For these reasons he is a very worthy winner of this year’s award.

Noam Chomsky’s Response:

Naturally I am very pleased to be granted this honour, and to be able to accept this award also in the name of my colleague Edward Herman, the co-author of Manufacturing Consent, who himself has done a great deal of outstanding work on this crucial topic. Of course, we’re not the first people to have addressed it.
Predictably, one of the earlier ones was George Orwell. He’s written a not very well known essay that is the introduction of his famous book Animal Farm. It’s not known because it wasn’t published – it was found decades later in his unpublished papers, but it is now available. In this essay he points out that Animal Farm is obviously a satire on the totalitarian enemy; but he urges people in free England to not feel too self-righteous about that, because as he puts it, in England, unpopular ideas can be suppressed without the use of force. He goes on to give examples of what he means, and only a few sentences of explanation, but I think they’re to the point.
One reason, he says, is that the press is owned by wealthy men who have every interest in not having certain ideas expressed. His second is a interesting point, that we didn’t go into but should have: a good education. If you go to the best schools you have instilled into you the understanding that there are certain things it just wouldn’t do to say. That, Orwell claims, is a powerful hook that goes well beyond the influence of the media.
Stupidity comes in many forms. I’d like to say a few words on one particular form that I think may be the most troubling of all. We might call it ‘institutional stupidity’. It’s a kind of stupidity that’s entirely rational within the framework within which it operates: but the framework itself ranges from grotesque to virtual insanity.
Instead of trying to explain it, it may be more helpful to mention a couple of examples to illustrate what I mean. Thirty years ago, in the early eighties – the early Reagan years – I wrote an article called ‘The Rationality of Collective Suicide’. It was concerned with nuclear strategy, and was about how perfectly intelligent people were designing a course of collective suicide in ways that were reasonable within their framework of geostrategic analysis.
I did not know at the time quite how bad the situation was. We have learnt a lot since. For instance, a recent issue of The Bulletin of Atomic Scientists presents a study of false alarms from the automatic detection systems the US and others use to detect incoming missile attacks and other threats that could be perceived as nuclear attack. The study ran from 1977 to 1983, and it estimates that during this period there were a minimum of about 50 such false alarms, and a maximum of about 255. These were alarms aborted by human intervention, preventing disaster by a matter of a few minutes.
It’s plausible to assume that nothing substantial has changed since then. But it actually gets much worse – which I also did not understand at the time of writing the book.
In 1983, at about the time I was writing it, there was a major war scare. This was in part due to what George Kennan, the eminent diplomat, at the time called “the unfailing characteristics of the march towards war – that, and nothing else.” It was initiated by programs the Reagan administration undertook as soon as Reagan came into office. They were interested in probing Russian defences, so they simulated air and naval attacks on Russia.
This was a time of great tension. US Pershing missiles had been installed in Western Europe, with a flight time of about five to ten minutes to Moscow. Reagan also announced his ‘Star Wars’ program, understood by strategists on both sides to be a first strike weapon. In 1983, Operation Able Archer included a practice that “took Nato forces through a full-scale simulated release of nuclear weapons.” The KGB, we have learnt from recent archival material, concluded that armed American forces had been placed on alert, and might even have begun the countdown to war.
The world has not quite reached the edge of the nuclear abyss; but during 1983, it had, without realizing it, come frighteningly close – certainly closer than at any time since the Cuban Missile Crisis of 1962. The Russian leadership believed that the US was preparing a first strike, and might well have launched a preemptive strike. I am actually quoting from a recent US high-level intelligence analysis, which concludes that the war scare was for real. The analysis points out that in the background was the Russians’ enduring memory of Operation Barbarossa, the German code-name for Hitler’s 1941 attack on the Soviet Union, which was the worst military disaster in Russian history, and came very close to destroying the country. The US analysis says that was exactly what the Russians were comparing the situation to.
That’s bad enough, but it gets still worse. About a year ago we learned that right in the midst of these world-threatening developments, Russia’s early-warning system – similar to the West’s, but much more inefficient – detected an incoming missile strike from the US and sent off the highest-level alert. The protocol for the Soviet military was to retaliate with a nuclear strike. But the order has to pass through a human being. The duty officer, a man named Stanislav Petrov, decided to disobey orders and not to report the warning to his superiors. He received an official reprimand. But thanks to his dereliction of duty, we’re now alive to talk about it.
We know of a huge number of false alarms on the US side. The Soviet systems were far worse. Now nuclear systems are being modernised.
The Bulletin of Atomic Scientists have a famous Doomsday Clock, and they recently advanced it two minutes. They explain that the clock “ticks now at three minutes to midnight because international leaders are failing to perform their most important duty, ensuring and preserving the health and vitality of human civilisation.”
Individually, these international leaders are certainly not stupid. However, in their institutional capacity their stupidity is lethal in its implications. Looking over the record since the first – and so far only – atomic attack, it’s a miracle that we’ve escaped.
Nuclear destruction is one of the two major threats to survival, and a very real one. The second, of course, is environmental catastrophe.
There’s a well-known professional services group at PricewaterhouseCoopers who have just released their annual study of the priorities of CEOs. At the top of the list is over-regulation. The report says that climate change did not make it into the top nineteen. Again, the CEOs are doubtless not stupid individuals. Presumably they run their businesses intelligently. But the institutional stupidity is colossal, literally life-threatening for the species.
Individual stupidity can be remedied, but institutional stupidity is much more resistant to change. At this stage of human society, it truly endangers our survival. That’s why I think institutional stupidity should be a prime concern.
Thank you.

Questions From The Audience:

How could we overcome media propaganda and improve the media? Through education?
This is an old debate. In the US it has been debated for over a century within the framework of the First Amendment to the US Constitution, which bars government action from preventing publication. Notice that it doesn’t protect freedom of speech, nor block punishment for speech.
There weren’t really many cases dealing with the First Amendment up until the Twentieth Century. The American press were very free previously, and there were a wide variety of all kinds of media: journals, magazines, pamphlets. The Founding Fathers believed in the freedom of information, and there were many efforts to stimulate the widest possible range of independent media. Freedom of speech, however, was not strongly protected.
Decisions on free speech began to be made around the First World War, but not by the courts. It wasn’t until the 1960s that the US established a high level of protection of freedom of speech. Meanwhile in the interwar period there was extensive discussion within the framework of what has been called ‘negative’ and ‘positive’ freedom, after Isaiah Berlin, of what the First Amendment implies about freedom of expression and of the press. There was a view sometimes called ‘corporate libertarianism’, which held that the First Amendment should concern negative freedom: that is the government can’t interfere with the right of media owners to do what they want. The other view was social democratic, and came out of the New Deal after the Depression and the early post-WWII period. That view held that there should also be positive freedom: in other words, that people should have the right to information as the basis for a democratic society. That battle was waged in the 1940s, and corporate libertarianism won. The US is unusual in this respect. There’s nothing like the BBC in the US. Most countries have some kind of national media which are as free as the society is. The US whacks that to the margins. The media were basically handed over to private power to exercise their capacities as they choose. That’s an interpretation of freedom of expression in terms of negative freedom: the state can’t intervene to affect what the private owners decide to do. There are a few restrictions, but not much. The consequences are pretty much a control of ideas as Orwell describes, and Edward Herman and I discuss this in great detail.
How do you overcome it? One way is education; but another way is by returning to the concept of positive freedom, which means recognising that in a democratic society we put a high value on the right of citizens to have access to a wide range of opinions and beliefs. That would, in the US, mean going back to what was in effect the earliest conception of the founders of the Republic, that there should be, not so much government regulation of what is said, but rather government support for a wide variety of opinions, news-gathering and interpretation – which can be stimulated in many ways.
Government means public: in a democratic society, government ought not to be some Leviathan making decisions. There are major grassroots projects that are trying to develop a more democratic media. This is a big battle because of the enormous power of the concentrated capital that of course tries to impede this in every possible way. But it’s a battle that has been going on for a long time, and there are fundamental issues at stake, including the issues of negative and positive freedoms.
Do you have any thoughts about the impact of search algorithms and search bubbles on the individual’s attempts to find information in their attempts to subvert Big Media?
Like all of you, I use search engines all the time. For people who are sufficiently privileged, the internet is very useful; but it’s usefulness is roughly to the extent that you do have privilege. ‘Privileged’ here means education, resources, a background ability to know what to look for.
It’s like a library. Suppose you decide ‘I want to be a biologist’, and so you join the Harvard Biology Library. Everything is in there, so in principle you can become a biologist; but of course it’s useless if you don’t know what to look for, and don’t know how to interpret what you see, and so on. It’s the same with the internet. There’s a huge amount of material out there – some valuable and some not – but it takes understanding, interpretation and background even to know what to look for. That’s quite apart from the fact that the Google system, for instance, is not a neutral system. It reflects advertiser interests in determining what’s prominent and what isn’t, and you have to know how to work your way through this maze. So it’s back to education and organisation enabling you to proceed.
I should stress that as an individual, you’re pretty limited in what you can come to understand, what ideas you can develop, how to think, even. So if you’re isolated, that highly restricts your ability to have and evaluate ideas, either in becoming a creative scientist or a functioning citizen. That’s one reason why the labor movement has always been at the forefront against information suppression, with workers education programs, for example, which were once extremely influential in both the UK and the US. The decline of what sociologists call ‘secondary associations’, where people come together to search and inquire, is one of the processes of atomisation which lead to people being isolated and facing this mass of information alone. So, the net’s a valuable tool, but as with all tools, you have to be in a position to be able to use it, and that’s not so simple. It requires significant social development.
How might it be possible to make institutions less stupid?
Well, it depends on what the institution is. I mentioned two: one is the government in control of a nuclear capacity; the other is the private sector, which is pretty much controlled through rather narrow concentrations of capital. They require different approaches. With regard to the government situation, this requires developing a functioning democratic society, in which an informed citizenry would play a central role in determining policy. The public is not in favour of facing death and destruction from nuclear weapons, and in this case we know in principle how to eliminate the threat. If the public were involved in developing security policy, I think this institutional stupidity could be overcome.
There’s a thesis in international relations theory that the prime concern of states is security. But that leaves open the question: Security for whom? If you look closely, it turns out it’s not security of the population, it’s security for privileged sectors within the society – the sectors who hold state power. There’s overwhelming evidence for this, which unfortunately I don’t have time to review. So one thing to do is to come to an understanding of whose security the state is in fact protecting: it’s not your security. It can be tackled by building a functioning democratic society.
On the issue of the concentration of private power, there’s also basically a problem of democratisation. A corporation is a tyranny. It’s the purest example of a tyranny you can imagine: power resides at the top, orders are sent down stage by stage, and at the very bottom, you have the option of purchasing what it produces. The population, the so-called stakeholders in the community, have almost no role in deciding what this entity does. And these entities have been granted extraordinary powers and rights, way beyond those of the individual. But none of it is graven in stone. None of it lies in economic theory. This situation is the result of, basically, class struggle, carried out by highly class-conscious business classes over a long period, which have now established their effective domination over society in various forms. But it doesn’t have to exist, it can change. Again, that’s a matter of democratising the institutions of social, political, and economic life. Easy to say, hard to do, but I think essential.

Original Source: Here. | ws

1993-2013: Russia & the USA

1993-2013: Is the twenty years long "pas de deux" of Russia and the USA coming to an end?

The latest tensions between the EU and Russia over Greenpeace's stunt in the Arctic only confirmed a fact which nobody really bothers denying anymore: Western political and financial elites absolutely hate Vladimir Putin and they are appalled at Russia's behavior, both inside Russia and on the international scene.  This tension was quite visible on the faces of Obama and Putin at the G8 summit in Lough Erne where both leaders looked absolutely disgusted with each other.  Things got even worse when Putin did something quite unheard of in the Russian diplomatic history: he publicly  said that Kerry was dishonest and even called him a liar.

While tensions have reached some sort of climax over the Syrian issue, problems between Russia and the USA are really nothing new.  A quick look at the recent past will show that the western corporate media has been engaged in a sustained strategic campaign to identify and exploit any possible weaknesses in the Russian "political armor" and to paint Russia like a very nasty, undemocratic and authoritarian country, in other words a threat to the West.   Let me mention a few episodes of this Russia-bashing campaign (in no particular order):

• Berezovsky as a "persecuted" businessman
• Politkovskaya "murdered by KGB goons"
• Khodorkovsky jailed for his love of "liberty"
• Russia's "aggression" against Georgia 
• The Russian "genocidal" wars against the Chechen people
• "Pussy Riot" as "prisoners of conscience"
• Litvinenko "murdered by Putin"
• Russian homosexuals "persecuted" and "mistreated" by the state
• Magnitsky and the subsequent "Magnitsky law"
• Snowden as a "traitor hiding in Russia"
• The "stolen elections" to the Duma and the Presidency
• The "White Revoluton" on the Bolotnaya square
• The "new Sakharov" - Alexei Navalnyi
• Russia's "support for Assad", the (Chemical) "Butcher of Baghdad"
• The Russian constant "intervention" in Ukrainian affairs
• The "complete control" of the Kremlin over the Russian media

This list is far from complete, but its sufficient for our purposes.  Let me also immediately add here that it is not my purpose today to debunk these allegations one by one.  I have done so in this blog many times the past, so anybody interested can look this up.  I will just state here one very important thing which I cannot prove, but of which I am absolutely certain: 90% or more of the Russian public believe that all these issues are absolute nonsense, completely overblown non-issues.  Furthermore, most Russians believe that the so-called "democratic forces" which the Western elites support in Russia (Iabloko, Parnas, Golos, etc.) are basically agents of influence for the West paid for by the CIA, MI6, Soros and exiled Jewish oligarchs.  What is certain is that besides these small liberal/democratic groups, nobody in Russia takes these accusations seriously.  Most people see them exactly for what they are: a smear campaign.

In many ways, this is rather reminiscent of how things stood during the Cold War where the West used its immense propaganda resources to demonize the Soviet Union and to support anti-Soviet forces worldwide, including inside the USSR itself.  I would argue that these efforts were, by and large, very successful and that by 1990s the vast majority of Soviets, including Russians, were rather disgusted with their leaders.  So why the big difference today?

To answer that question, we need to look back at the processes which took place in Russia in the last 20 years or so because only a look at what happened during these two decades will allows us to get to the root of the current problem(s) between the USA and Russia.

When did the Soviet Union truly disappear?

The official date of the end of the Soviet Union is 26 December 1991, the day of the adoption by the Supreme Soviet of the Soviet Union of the  Declaration № 142-Н which officially recognized dissolution of the Soviet Union as a state and subject of international law.  But that is a very superficial, formal, view of things.  One could argue that even though the Soviet Union had shrunk to the size of the Russian Federation it still survived within these smaller borders.  After all, the laws did not change overnight, neither did most of the bureaucracy, and even though the Communist Party itself had been banned following the August 1991 coup, the rest of the state apparatus still continued to exist.

For Eltsin and his supporters this reality created a very difficult situation.  Having banned the CPUS and dismantled the KGB, Eltsin's  liberals still face a formidable adversary: the Supreme Soviet of the Russian Federation, the Parliament of the Russian Soviet Federative Socialist Republic, elected by the Congress of People's Deputies of the Russian Federation.  Nobody had abolished this *very* Soviet institution which rapidly became the center of almost all of the anti-Eltsin and pro-Soviet forces in the country.  I cannot go in all the details of this legal nightmare, suffice to say that the Supreme Soviet presented itself as the "Russian Parliament" (which is not quite true) and that its members engaged in a systematic campaign to prevent Eltsin to implement his "reforms" (in hindsight, one could say that they tried to prevent Eltsin from ruining the country).  One could say that the "new Russia" and the "old USSR" were fighting each other for the future of the country.  Predictably, the Supreme Soviet wanted a parliamentary democracy while Eltsin and his liberals wanted a presidential democracy.  The two sides presented what appeared to be a stark contrast to most Russians:


1) The Russian President Eltsin: officially he represented Russia, as opposed to the Soviet Union; he presented himself as an anti-Communist and as a democrat (nevermind that he himself had been a high ranking member of the CPSU and even a non-voting member to the Politburo!).  Eltsin was also clearly the darling of the West and he promised to integrate Russia into the western world.

2) The Supreme Soviet: headed by Ruslan Khasbulatov with the support of the Vice-President of Russia, Alexander Rutskoi, the Supreme Soviet became the rallying point of all those who believed that the Soviet Union had been dissolved illegally (which is true) and against the will of the majority of its people (which is also true).  Most, though not all, the supporters of the Supreme Soviet were if not outright Communists, then at least socialists and anti-capitalists.  A good part of the rather disorganized Russian nationalist movement also supported the Supreme Soviet.

We all know what eventually happened: Eltsin crushed the opposition in a huge bloodbath, far worse than what was reported in the Western (or even Russian) media.  I write that with a high degree of confidence because I have personally received this information from a very good source: it so happens that I was in Moscow during those tragic days and that and I was in constant contact with a Colonel of a rather secretive special forces unit of the KGB called "Vympel" (more about that below) who told me that the internal KGB estimate of the number of people killed in the Moscow Oblast was close to 3'000 people.  I can also personally attest that the combats lasted for far longer than the official narrative clams: I witnessed a very sustained machine gun battle right under my windows a full 5 days after the Supreme Soviet had surrendered.  I want to stress this here because I think that this illustrates an often overlooked reality: the so-called "constitutional crisis of 1993" was really a mini civil war for the fate of the Soviet Union and only by the end of this crisis did the Soviet Union really truly disappear.

In the days preceeding the tank assault against the Supreme Soviet I had the opportunity to spend a lot of time with supporters of the President and the Supreme Soviet.  I took the time to engage them in long conversations to try to find out for myself what each side stood for and whether I should side with either party.  The conclusion I came to was a rather sad one: both sides were primarily composed of ex- (or not ex-) Communists, both sides claimed that they were defending democracy and both sides accused each other of being Fascists.  In reality both sides were in reality very much alike.  I think that I was not the only person to feel that way in these days and I suspect that most of the people of Russia deeply felt this and ended up being  really disgusted with all of the politicians involved.

I would like to share one more personal anecdote here: these tragic days were personally quite amazing for me.  Here I was, a young man born in a family of rabidly anti-Soviet Russian emigrés, who has spent many years fighting to Soviet system and, especially, the KGB.  And yet, ironically, I ended up spending most of my time in the company of a Colonel of a special forces unit of the KGB (how we met is a long story for another post).  Even more amazing for me was the fact that for all our differences, we had the exact same reaction to the events taking place before our eyes.  We both decided that we could not side with either party engaged in this conflict - both sides were equally repugnant to us.  I was in his apartment when he received a call from the KGB headquarters ordering to show up at a location downtown to prepare a special forces assault against the "White House" (that was the street nickname of the Russian Parliament building) - he refused to obey, told his bosses to get lost, and hung up.  He was not alone in that decision: just as in 1991, neither the Russian paratroopers nor the special forces agreed to shoot at their own people (others, supposedly "democratic" forces showed no such scruples).  Instead of obeying his bosses orders, my new friend took the time to give me some very valuable advice about how to safely get a relative of mine out of Moscow without getting shot or detained (being a native Russian speaker with a foreign passport was not a very safe thing in these days).

I wanted to retell this story here because it shows something very important: by 1993 a vast majority of Russians, even exiled emigrés and KGB special forces Colonels, were deeply disgusted and fed up with both parties to this crisis.  In a way, one could say that most Russians were waiting for a THIRD force to appear on the political scene.

From 1993 to 1999 - a democratic nightmare

After the crushing of the opposition by Eltsin's thugs, the gates of Hades truly opened for Russia: the entire country was taken over by various Mafias and the vast natural resources were pillaged by (mostly Jewish) oligarchs.  The so-called "privatization" of the Russian economy created both a new class of multi-millionaires and many tens of millions of very poor people who could barely survive.  A huge crime wave overtook every city, the entire infrastructure of the country collapsed and many regions of Russia began actively planning their secession from the Russian Federation. Chechnia was allowed to secede from the Russian Federation after a grotesque and bloody war which saw the Russian military back-stabbed by the Kremlin.  And throughout these truly hellish years, the Western elites gave their fullest support to Eltsin and his oligarchs.  The only exception to this love-fest was the political, economic and military support given by the Anglosphere to the Chechen insurgency.  Eventually, what had to happen did happen: the country declared bankruptcy in 1998 by devaluing the Ruble and defaulting on its debt.  Though we will never know for sure, I firmly believe that by 1999 Russia was only a few steps away from completely disappearing as a country and as a nation.

The legacy left by the liberals/democrats

Having crushed the opposition in 1993, the Russian liberals acquired the complete freedom to write a new constitution which would perfectly suit their purpose, and with their typical short-sightedness they adopted a new Constitution which gave immense powers to the President and really very little to the new Parliament, the Russian Duma.  They even went as far as abolishing the post of Vice-President (they did not want another Rutskoi to sabotage their plans).

And yet, in the 1996 Presidential elections the liberals almost lost it all.  To their horror, the Communist Candidate Gennadi Zuiganov won most of the votes in the 1st  round, which forced the liberals to do two things: first, of course, they falsified the officials results and, second, they passed an alliance with a rather popular Army General, Alexander Lebed.  These two moves made it possible for them to declare that they had won the 2nd round (even though in reality Ziuganov won).  Here again, the West fully supported Eltsin.  Well, why not?  Having given Eltsin full support for his bloody crackdown on the supporters of the Supreme Soviet, why not also support Eltisin in a stolen election, right?  In for a dime, in for a dollar.

Eltsin himself, however spent most of his time drinking himself to death and it soon became rather clear that he would not last very long.  Panic seized the liberal camp which ended up committing a huge mistake: they allowed a little-known and rather unimpressive bureaucrat from Saint Petersburg to replace Eltsin as Acting President: Vladimir Putin.

Putin was a quiet, low key, competent bureaucrat whose main quality appeared to be his lack of a strong personality, or so did the liberals think.  And, boy, was that one big miscalculation!

As soon as he was appointed, Putin acted with lightening speed.  He immediately surprised everybody by becoming personally involved the the 2nd Chechen war.  Unlike his predecessor, Putin gave all the freedom to the military commanders to wage this war as they wanted.   The Putin surprized everybody again when he made a truly historic deal with Ahmad Hadji Kadyrov to bring peace to Chechnia even though the latter had been a leader of the insurgency during the first Chechen war.

Putin's popularity soared and he immediately used that to his advantage.

In an amazing twist of history, Putin used the Constitution developed and adopted by the Russian liberals to implement a very rapid series of crucial reforms and to eliminate the power basis of the liberals: the Jewish oligarchs (Berezovksy, Khorodkovsky, Fridman, Gusinsky, etc.).  He also passed many laws destined to "strengthen the vertical power" which gave the Federal Center direct control over the local administrations.  This, in turn, not only crushed many of the local Mafias who had managed to corrupt and  infiltrate the local authorities, it also rapidly stopped all the various secessionist movements inside Russia.  Finally, he used what is called the "administrative resource" to create his United Russia party and to give it the full support from the state.  The irony here is that Putin would never have never succeeded in these efforts had the Russian liberals not created a hyper-Presidential Constitution which gave Putin the means to achieve his goals.  To paraphrase Lenin, I would say that the Russian liberals gave Putin the rope to hang them.

The West, of course, rapidly understood what was going on, but it was too late: the liberals had lost power forever (God willing!) and the country was clearly being taken over by a third, previously unseen, force.

Who really put Putin into power?

That is the $10'000 question.  Formally, the official answer is straightforward: Eltsin's entourage.  Still, it is rather obvious that some other unidentified group of people managed to brilliantly con the liberals into letting the fox inside their hen house.

Now remember that the pro-Soviet forces were comprehensively defeated in 1993.  So this was not the result of some nostalgic revanchists who wanted to resurrect the old Soviet Union.  So no need to look to the this camp who, in fact, has mostly  remained opposed to Putin to this day.  So who else then?

It was an alliance of two forces, really:  elements of the ex "PGU KGB SSSR" and a number of key industrial and financial leaders.  Let's take then one by one:

The first force was the PGU KGB SSSR: the foreign intelligence branch of the Soviet KGB.  It's official name was First Chief Directorate of the Committee of State Security of the USSR.  This would be the rough equivalent of the British MI6.  This was beyond any doubt the most elite part of the KGB, and also its most autonomous one (it even had its own headquarters in the south of Moscow).  Though the PGU dealt with a number of issues, it was also very closely linked to, and interested by, the the world of big business, in the USSR and abroad.  Since the PGU had nothing to do with the KGB's most ugly activities such as the persecution of dissidents (that was the role of the 5th Directorate) and since it has little to do with internal security (that was the prerogative of the 2nd Chief Directorate), it was not high on the list of institutions to reform simply because it was not hated as much as the more visible part of the KGB.

The second force which put Putin in power was constituted by young people coming from key ministries of the former Soviet Union which dealt with industrial and financial issues and which hated Eltsin's Jewish oligarchs.  Unlike Eltsin's oligarchs, these young leaders did not want to simply pillage all the resources of Russia and later retire in the US or Israel, but they did want Russia to become a powerful market economy integrated into the international financial system.

Later, the first group would turn into what I call the "Eurasian Sovereignists" while the second one would become what I call "Atlantic Integrationists" (please see here and here for an explanation of these terms).  We could think of them as the "Putin people" and the "Medvedev people".

Lastly, it should not be overlooked that there is, of course, a third force which threw its full support behind this Putin-Medvedev tandem - the Russian people themselves who have, so far, always voted to keep them in power.

An absolutely brilliant formula but which has now outlived its shelf life

There is no doubt in my mind that the idea to create this "tandem" has been nothing short of brilliant: Putin would cater to the nationalists, Medvedev to the more liberally oriented folk.  Putin would get the support of the "power ministries" (defense, security, intelligence) while Medvedev would get the support of the business community.  Putin could scare the local authorities into compliance with the orders from the federal center, while Medvedev would make the US and EU feel good at Davos.  Or, let's put it this way: who would be against the Putin & Medvedev duo? Diehard supporters of the Soviet Union, rabid xenophobic nationalists, rabid pro-US liberals and Jewish exiles.  That's pretty much it, and that ain't much.

By the way - what do we see in today's opposition?  A Communist Party catering to those nostalgic of the Soviet era, a Liberal-Democratic Party catering to the nationalists, and a pretty small "Just Russia" party whose sole purpose appear to be to take votes off the other two and coopt some of the rabid liberals.  In other words, Medvedev and Putin have basically eliminated any type of credible opposition.

As I have mentioned in past posts, there are now clear signs of serious tensions between the "Eurasian Sovereignists" and the "Atlantic Integrationists" to the point that Putin has now created his own movement (the "All-Russia People's Front", created by Putin in 2011 (again, for background on that please see here and here). 

Having looked at the complex processes which ended up creating the Putin Presidency in Russia, we need to look at what took place in the USA during the same time period.

In the meantime - the US gets Neoconned

Unlike the Soviet Union which basically disappeared from the map of our planet, the USA "won" the Cold War (this is not factually quite true, but this is how many Americans see it) and having become the last and only real super-power the US immediately embarked on a series of external wars to establish its "full spectrum dominance" over the planet, especially after the events of 9/11 which deeply transformed the nature of the US society itself. 

Sill, the post 9/11 society has its roots in a far more distant past: the Reagan years.

During the Presidency of Ronald Reagan a group which later become known as the "Necons" made a strategic decision to take over the Republican Party, its affiliated institutions and think tanks.  While in the past ex-Trotskyites had been more inclined to support the putatively more Left-leaning Democratic Party, the "new and improved GOP" under Reagan offered the Neocons some extremely attractive features:

1) Money: Reagan was an unconditional supporter of big business and the corporate world.  His mantra "government is the problem" fitted perfectly with the historical closeness of the Neocons with the Robber Barons, Mafia bosses and big bankers.  For them, de-regulation meant freedom of action, something which was bound to make speculators and Wall Street wise guys immensely rich.

2) Violence: Reagan also firmly stood behind the US Military-Industrial complex and a policy of intervention in any country on the planet.  That fascination with brute force and, let be honest here, terrorism also fitted the Trotskyite-Neocon mindset perfectly.

3) Illegality: Reagan did not care at all about the law, be it international law or domestic law.  Sure, as long as the law happens to be advantageous to US or GOP interests, it was upheld with great ceremony.  But if it didn't, the Reaganites would break it with no compunction whatsoever.

4) Arrogance: under Reagan, patriotism and feel-good imperial hubris reached a new height.  More than ever before, the US saw itself as not only the "Leader of the Free World" protecting the planet against the "Evil Empire", but also as unique and superior to the rest of mankind (like in the Ford commercial of the 1980s: "we're number one, second to none!")

5) Systematic deception: under Reagan lying turned from an occasional if regular tactics used in politics to the key form of public communication: Reagan, and his administration, could say one thing and then deny it in the same breath.  They could make promises which were clearly impossible to keep (Star Wars anybody?).  They could solemnly take an oath and than break it (Iran-Contra).  And, if confronted by proof of these lies, all Reagan had to do is to say: "well, no, I don't remember".

6) Messianism: not only did Reagan get a huge support basis amongst the various crazy religious denominations in the USA (including all of the Bible Belt), Reagan also promoted a weird can of secular Messianism featuring a toxic mix of xenophobia bordering on racism with a narcissistic fascination with anything patriotic, no matter how stupid, bordering on self-worship.

So let's add it all up:

Money+violence+illegality+arrogance+deception+Messianism equals what?

Does that not all look very, very familiar?  Is that not a perfect description of Zionism and Israel?

No wonder the Neocons flocked in greater and greater number to this new GOP!  Reagan's GOP was the perfect Petri dish for the Zionist bacteria to grow, and grow it really did.  A lot.

I think that it would be reasonable to say that the USA underwent a two-decades long process of "Zionisation" which culminated in the grand 9/11 false flag operation in which the PNAC-types basically used their access to the centers of power in the USA, Israel and the KSA to conjure up a new enemy - "Islamo-Fascist Terror" - which would not only justify a planetary war against "terrorism" (the GWOT) but also an unconditional support for Israel.

There were also losers in this evolution, primarily what I call the "old Anglo camp" which basically lost control of most of its domestic political power and all of its foreign policy power: for the first time a new course in foreign policy gradually began to take shape under the leadership of a group of people which would in time be identified as "Israel Firsters".  For a short time the old Anglos seemed to have retaken the reigns of power - under George Bush Senior - only to immediately loose it again with the election of Bill Clinton.  But the apogee of Ziocon power was only reached under the Presidency of George W. Bush who basically presided over a massive purge of Anglos from key positions in government (especially the Pentagon and the CIA).  Predictably, having the folks which Bush Senior called "the crazies in the basement" actually in power rapidly brought the USA to the edge of a global collapse: externally the massive worldwide sympathy for the USA after 911 turned into a tsunami of loathing and resentment, while internally the country was faced with a massive banking crisis which almost resulted the imposition of martial law over the USA.

In comes Barak Obama - "change we can believe in!"

The election of Barak Obama to the White House truly was a momentous historical event.  Not only because a majority White population had elected a Black man to the highest office in the country (this was really mainly an expression of despair and of a deep yearning for change), but because after one of the most effective PR campaigns in history, the vast majority of Americans and many, if not most, people abroad, really, truly believed that Obama would make some deep, meaningful changes.  The disillusion with Obama was as great as the hopes millions had in him.  I personally feel that history will remember Obama not only as one of the worst Presidents in history, but also, and that is more important, as the last chance for the "system" to reform itself.  That chance was missed.  And while some, in utter disgust, described Obama as "Bush light", I think that his Presidency can be better described as  "more of the same, only worse".

Having said that, there is something which, to my absolute amazement, Obama's election did achieve: the removal of (most, but not all) Neocons from (most, but not all) key positions of power and a re-orientation of (most, but not all) of US foreign policy in a more traditional "USA first" line, usually supported by the "old Anglo" interests.  Sure, the Neocons are still firmly in control of Congress and the US corporate media, but the Executive Branch is, at least for the time being, back under Anglo control (this is, of course, a generalization: Dick Cheney was neither Jewish nor Zionist, while the Henry Kissinger can hardly be described as an "Anglo").  And even though Bibi Netanyahu got more standing ovations in Congress (29) than any US President, the attack on Iran he wanted so badly did not happen.  Instead,  Hillary and Petraeus got kicked out, and Chuck Hagel and John Kerry got in.  That is hardly "change we can believe in", but at least this shows that the Likud is not controlling the White House any more.

Of course, this is far from over.  If anything the current game of chicken played between the White House and Congress over the budget with its inherent risk of a US default shows that this conflict is far from settled.

The current real power matrix in the USA and Russia

We have shown that there two unofficial parties in Russia which are locked in a deadly conflict for power, the "Eurasian Sovereignists" and "Atlantic Integrationists".  There are also two unofficial parties in the USA who are also locked in a deadly conflict for power: the Neocons and the "old Anglos imperialists".  I would argue that, at least for the time being, the "Eurasian Sovereignists" and the "old Anglos" have prevailed over their internal competitor but that the Russian "Eurasian Sovereignists" are in a far stronger position that the American "old Anglos".   There are two main reasons for that:

1)  Russia has already had its economic collapse and default and
2)  a majority of Russians fully support President Putin and his "Eurasian Sovereignist" policies. 

 In contrast, the USA is on the brink of an economic collapse and the 1% clique which is running the USA is absolutely hated and despised by most Americans.

After the immense and, really, heart-breaking disillusionment with Obama, more and more Americans are becoming convinced that changing the puppet in the White House is meaningless and that what the US really needs is regime change.
 
The USSR and the USA - back to the future?

It is quite amazing for those who remember the Soviet Union of the late 1980 how much the US under Obama has become similar to the USSR under Brezhnev: internally it is characterized by a general sense of disgust and alienation of the people triggered by the undeniable stagnation of a system rotten to its very core. A bloated military and police state with uniforms everywhere, while more and more people live in abject poverty.  A public propaganda machine which, like in Orwell's 1984, constantly boasts of successes everywhere while everybody knows that these are all lies.  Externally, the US is hopelessly overstretched and either hated and mocked abroad.  Just as in the Soviet days, the US leaders are clearly afraid of their own people so they protect themselves by a immense and costly global network of spies and propagandists who are terrified of dissent and who see the main enemy in their own people. 

Add to that a political system which far from co-opting the best of its citizens deeply alienates them while promoting the most immoral and corrupt ones into the positions of power.  A booming prison-industrial complex and a military-industrial complex which the country simply cannot afford maintaining.  A crumbling public infrastructure combined with a totally dysfunctional health care system in which only the wealthy and well-connected can get good treatment.  And above it all, a terminally sclerotic public discourse, full of ideological clichés an completely disconnected from reality.

I will never forget the words of a Pakistani Ambassador to the UN Conference on Disarmament in Geneva in 1992 who, addressing an assembly of smug western diplomats, said the following words: "you seem to believe that you won the Cold War, but did you ever consider the possibility that what has really happened is that the internal contradictions of communism caught up with communism before the internal contradictions of capitalism could catch up with capitalism?!".  Needless to say, these prophetic words were greeted by a stunned silence and soon forgotten.  But the man was, I believe, absolutely right: capitalism has now reached a crisis as deep as the one affecting the Soviet Union in the late 1980s and there is zero chance to reform or otherwise change it.  Regime change is the only possible outcome.

The historical roots of the russophobia of the American elites

Having said all of the above, its actually pretty simple to understand why Russia in general, and Putin in particular, elicits such a deep hatred from the Western plutocracy: having convinced themselves that they won the Cold War they are now facing the double disappointment of a rapidly recovering Russia and a Western economic and political decline turning into what seems to be a slow and painful agony.

In their bitterness and spite, Western leaders overlook the fact that Russia has nothing to do with the West's current problems.  Quite to the contrary, in fact: the main impact the collapse of the Soviet Union on the US-run international economic system was to prolong its existence by creating a new demand for US dollars in Eastern Europe and Russia (some economists - such as Nikolai Starikov -  estimate that the collapse of the USSR gave an extra 10+ years of life to the US dollar).

In the past, Russia has been the historical arch-enemy of the British Empire.  As for Jews - they have always harbored many grievances towards pre-revolutionary Tsarist Russia.  The Revolution of 1917 brought a great deal of hope for many East-European Jews, but it was short lived as Stalin defeated Trotsky and the Communist Party was purged from many of its Jewish members.  Over and over again Russia has played a tragic role in the history of the Ashkenazi Jews and this, of course, has left a deep mark on the worldview of the Neocons who are all deeply russophobic, even today.  Somebody might object that many Jews are deeply grateful for the Soviet Army's liberation of Jews from the Nazi concentration camps or for the fact that the Soviet Union was the first country to recognize Israel.  But in both cases, the country which is credited with these actions is the Soviet Union and not Russia which most Ashkenazi Jews still typically associate anti-Jewish policies and values.

It is thus not surprising that both the Anglo and the Jewish elites in the US would harbor an almost instinctive dislike for, and fear of, Russia, especially one perceived as resurgent or anti-American.  And the fact is that they are not wrong in this perception: Russia is most definitely resurgent, and the vast majority of the Russian public opinion is vehemently anti-American, at least if by "America" we refer to the civilizational model or economic system. 

Anti-American sentiment in Russia

Feelings about the USA underwent a dramatic change since the fall of the Soviet Union.  In the 1980 the USA was not only rather popular, it was also deeply in fashion:  Russian youth created many rock groups (some of them became immensely popular and still are popular today, such as the group DDT from Saint Petersburg), American fashion and fast foods were the dream of every Russian teenager, while most intellectuals sincerely saw the US as "leader of the free world".  Of course,  the state propaganda of the USSR always wanted to present the USA as an aggressive imperialistic country, but that effort failed: most of the people were actually quite fond of the US.  One of the most popular pop group of the 1990s (Nautilus Pompilius) had a song with the following lyrics:

Good bye America, oh
Where I have never ever been
Farewell forever!
Take your banjo
And play for my departure
la-la-la-la-la-la, la-la-la-la-la-la
Your worn out blue jeans
Became too tight for me
We’ve been taught for too long
To be in love with your forbidden fruits.

While there were exceptions to this rule, I would say that by the beginning of the 1990 most of the Russian people, especially the youth, had swallowed the US propaganda line hook and sinker - Russia was hopelessly pro-American.

The catastrophic collapse of the Soviet Union in 1991 and the West's total and unconditional backing for Eltsin and his oligarchs changed that.  Instead of trying to help Russia, the USA and the West used every single opportunity to weaken Russia externally (by taking all of Eastern Europe into NATO even though they had promised never to do so).  Internally, they West supported the Jewish oligarchs who were literally sucking out wealth out of Russia live vampires suck blood, while supporting every imaginable form of separatism.  By the end of the 1990s the words "democrat" and "liberal" became offensive curse words.  This joke of the late 1990s is a good example of these feelings (Notice the association between liberalism and Jews):

A new teacher comes into the class:
- My name is Abram Davidovich, I'm a liberal. And now all stand up and introduce yourself like I did ...
- My name is Masha I liberal ...
- My name is Petia, I'm a liberal ...
- My Little Johnny, I'm a Stalinist.
- Little Johnny, why are you a Stalinist? !
- My mom is a Stalinist, my dad is a Stalinist, my friends are Stalinists and I too am a Stalinist.
- Little Johnny, and if your mother was a whore, your father - a drug addict, your friends - homos, what would you be then in that case? !
- Then I would be a liberal.

Notice the association between being a liberal and Jews (Abram Davidovich is a typical Jewish name).  Notice also the inclusion of the category "homosexual" in between a whore and drug addicts and remember that when evaluating the typical Russian reaction to the anti-Russian campaign waged by western homosexual organizations.

The political effect of these feelings is rather obvious: in the last elections not a single pro-Western political party has even managed to get enough votes to make it into the Parliament.  And no - this is not because Putin has outlawed them (as some propagandists in the West like to imagine).  There are currently 57 political parties in Russia, and quite a few of them are pro-Western.  And yet it is an undeniable fact that the percentage of Russians which are favorably inclined towards the USA and NATO/EU is roughly in the 5% range.  I can also put it this way: every single political party represented in the Duma is deeply anti-American, even the very moderate "Just Russia".

Anti-Russian feelings in the USA?

Considering the never ending barrage of anti-Russian propaganda in the western corporate media one could wonder how strong anti-Russian feelings are in the West.  This is really hard to measure objectively, but as somebody born in Western Europe and who has lived a total of 15 years in the USA I would say that anti-Russian sentiment in the West is very rare, almost non-existent.  In the USA there have always been strong anti-Communist feelings - there still are today - but somehow most Americans do make the difference between a political ideology that they don't really understand, but that they dislike anyway, and the people which in the past used to be associated with it.

US *politicians*, of course, mostly hate Russia, but most Americans seem to harbor very little bad feelings or apprehension about Russia or the Russian people. I explain that by a combination of factors.

First, since more and more people in the West realize that they are not living in a democracy, but in a plutocracy of the 1%, they tend to take the official propaganda line with more than a grain of salt (which, by the way, is exactly what was happening to most Soviet people in the 1980s).  Furthermore, more and more people in the West who oppose the plutocratic imperial order which impoverishes and disenfranchises them into corporate serfs are quite sympathetic to Russia and Putin for "standing up to the bastards in Washington".  But even more fundamentally, there is the fact that in a bizarre twist of history Russia today stands for the values of the West of yesterday: international law, pluralism, freedom of speech, social rights, anti-imperialism, opposition to intervention inside sovereign states, rejection of wars as a means to settle disputes, etc.

In the case of the war in Syria, Russia's absolutely consistent stance in defense of international law has impressed many people in the USA and Europe and one can hear more and more praise for Putin from people who in the past has deep suspicions about him.

Russia, of course, is hardly a utopia or some kind of perfect society, far from it, but it has taken the fundamental decision to become a *normal* country, as opposed to being a global empire, and any normal country will agree to uphold the principles of the "West of yesterday", not only Russia.  In fact, Russia is very un-exceptional in its pragmatic realization that to uphold these principles is not a matter of naive idealism, but a sound realistic policy goal.  People in the West are told by their rulers and the corporate media that Putin in an evil ex-KGB dictator who is a danger for the US and its allies, but as soon as these people actually read or listen to what Putin actually says they find themselves in a great deal of agreement with him.

In another funny twist of history, while the Soviet population used to turn to the BBC, Voice of America or Radio Liberty for news and information, more and more people in the West are turning to Russia Today, Press TV, or Telesur to get their information.  Hence the panicked reaction of Walter Isaacson,  Chairman of the Broadcasting Board of Governors, the US outfit overseeing US media directed at foreign audiences, who declared that “we can't allow ourselves to be out-communicated by our enemies.  You've got Russia Today, Iran's Press TV, Venezuela's TeleSUR, and of course, China is launching an international broadcasting 24-hour news channel with correspondents around the world".  Folks like Isaacson know that they are slowly but surely loosing the informational battle for the control of the minds of the general public.

And now, with the entire Snowden affair, Russia is becoming the safe harbor for those political activists who are fleeing Uncle Sam's wrath.  A quick search on the Internet will show you that more and more people are referring to Putin as the "leader of the Free World" while other are collecting signatures to have Obama give his Nobel Prize to Putin.  Truly, for those like myself who have actually fought against the Soviet system it is absolutely amazing to see the 180 degree turn the world has taken since the 1980s.

Western elites - still stuck in the Cold War

If the world has radically changed in the last 20 years, the Western elites did not.  Faced with a very frustrating reality they are desperately trying to re-fight the Cold War with the hope of re-winning it again.  Hence the never ending cycle of Russia-bashing campaigns I mentioned at the beginning of this post. They try to re-brand Russia as the new Soviet Union, with oppressed minorities, jailed or murdered dissidents, little or no freedom of speech, a monolithic state controlled media and an all seeing security apparatus overseeing it all.  The problem, of course, is that they are 20 years late and that these accusations don't stick very well with the western public opinion and get exactly *zero* traction inside Russia.  In fact, every attempt at interfering inside Russian political affairs has been so inept and clumsy that it backfired every single time.  From the absolutely futile attempts of the West to organize a color-coded revolution in the streets of Moscow to the totally counter-productive attempts to create some kind of crisis around homosexual human rights in Russia - every step taken by the western propaganda machine has only strengthened Vladimir Putin and his the "Eurasian Sovereignists" at the expense of the "Atlantic Integrationist" faction inside the Kremlin.

There was a deep and poignant symbolism in the latest meeting of the 21 APEC countries in Bali.  Obama had to cancel his trip because of the US budget crisis while Putin was treated to a musically horrible but politically deeply significant rendition of "Happy birthday to you!" by a spontaneous choir composed of the leaders of the Pacific Rim countries.  I can just imagine the rage of the White House when they saw "their" Pacific allies serenading Putin for his birthday!

Conclusion: "we are everywhere"

In one of his most beautiful songs, David Rovics sings the following words which I want to quite in full, as each line fully applies to the current situation:

When I say the hungry should have food
I speak for many
When I say no one should have seven homes
While some don't have any
Though I may find myself stranded in some strange place
With naught but a vapid stare
I remember the world and I know
We are everywhere

When I say the time for the rich, it will come
Let me count the ways
Victories or hints of the future
Havana, Caracas, Chiapas, Buenos Aires
How many people are wanting and waiting
And fighting for their share
They hide in their ivory towers
But we are everywhere

Religions and prisons and races
Borders and nations
FBI agents and congressmen
And corporate radio stations
They try to keep us apart, but we find each other
And the rulers are always aware
That they're a tiny minority
And we are everywhere

With every bomb that they drop, every home they destroy
Every land they invade
Comes a new generation from under the rubble
Saying "we are not afraid"
They will pretend we are few
But with each child that a billion mothers bear
Comes the next demonstration
That we are everywhere. 

(you can listen to the song by clicking here)

These words are a beautiful expression for the hope which should inspire all those who are now opposing the US-Zionist Empire: we are everywhere, literally.  On one side we have the 1%, the Anglo imperialists and the Ziocons, while on the other we have the rest of the planet, including potentially 99% of the American people.  If it is true that at this moment in time Putin and his Eurasian Sovereignists are the most powerful and best organized faction of the worldwide resistance to the Empire, they are far from being central, or even less so, crucial, to it.  Yes, Russia can, and will, play its role, but only as a normal country amongst many other normal countries, some small and economically weak like Ecuador, other huge and powerful like China.  But even small Ecuador was "big enough" to grand refuge to Julian Assange while China seems to have asked Snowden to please leave.  So Ecuador is not that small after all?

It would be naive to hope that this "de-imperialization" process of the USA could happen without violence.  The French and British Empires collapsed against the bloody backdrop of WWII, while did the Nazi and Japanese Empires were crushed under a carpet of bombs.  The Soviet Empire collapsed with comparatively less victims, and most of the violence which did take place during that process happened on the Soviet periphery.  In Russia itself, the number of death of the mini civil war of 1993 was counted in the thousands and not in the millions. And by God's great mercy, not a single nuclear weapon was detonated anywhere.

So what will likely happen when the US-Ziocon Empire finally collapses under its own weight?  Nobody can tell for sure, but we can at least hope that just as no major force appeared to rescue the Soviet Empire in 1991-1993, no major force will attempt to save the US Empire either.  As David Rovic's puts it so well, the big weakness of the 1% which rule the US-Ziocon Empire is that "they are a tiny minority and we are everywhere".

In the past 20 years the US and Russia have followed diametrically opposed courses and their roles appears to have been reversed.  That "pas de deux" is coming to some kind of end now.  Objective circumstances have now again placed these two countries in opposition to each other, but this is solely due to the nature of the regime in Washington DC.  Russian leaders could repeat the words of the English rapper Lowkey and declare "I'm not anti-America, America is anti-me!" and they could potentially be joined by 99% of Americans who, whether they already realize it or not, are also the victims of the US-Ziocon Empire.

In the meantime, the barrage of anti-Russian propaganda campaigns will continue unabated simply because this seems to have become a form of psychotherapy for a panicked and clueless western plutocracy.  And just as in all the previous cases, this propaganda campaign will have no effect at all.

It is my hope that next time we hear about whatever comes next after the current "Greenpeace" campaign you will keep all this in mind.

The Saker

Original Source: Here.