As the Duran reported, it was only a matter of time before the ‘Putin Did It’ (see The Duran Lexicon for more) line crept back into the news in light of a re-opened FBI investigation, following the discovery more incriminating Hillary Clinton emails. Sure enough, Howard Dean, the man who ended his own presidential campaign by acting like a crazed hooligan on stage, has said that now the FBI and Putin are on the same side.
This comes days after Putin reassured the world that he really doesn’t want, need or care to meddle in the US election. Of course the usual suspects in the western mainstream media don’t listen to Putin because he’s just too damn reasonable. It seems that western mainstream media are confounded by Putin’s calm, his consistency, his logic and moreover by the fact that he doesn’t seem too perturbed about the issues that western pundits go hysterical over on a daily basis.
In order to make life easier for those who ‘question more’ in the following week, I’ve come up with a list of the varieties of people who say ‘Putin did it’ and why.
1. THE OLD ANTI-SOVIET COLD WARRIOR WITH IMAGINARY NUKES AT THE READY
This is an increasingly small but vocal group of people who lost their raison d’etre after the illegal break-up of the Soviet Union. Much like the members of the CPSU who rallied against the leadership of Gorbachev in 1991, this variety of person was equally devastated by the loss of Soviet power. The absence of the USSR meant that they could no longer talk about nuking Moscow in order to ‘free the people’ from Communism. In an instant they went from being extreme defenders of liberty, to trigger happy weirdos.
But life has recently got a lot better for them. These people go home at night pretending that the leader of the Communist Party of the Russian Federation is not Gennady Zyuganov but Vladimir Putin. To them the Soviet Union is back and so too is the great crusade against it.
Many of these people couldn’t actually care less about Hillary Clinton’s emails and her crimes against everyone from Bernie Sanders to foreign heads of state. They’re simply happy that a mainstream political figure has allowed them to once again feel relevant. The USSR is back, it must be destroyed by any means necessary and the former Goldwater supporter Hillary Clinton is their kind of gal. Put on your cowboy boots…
2. THE PATHOLOGICAL ANTI-RUSSIAN RACIST
This group has roots which date back far beyond America’s ascension as a world power. Unlike the previous group, these people are no laughing matter. Where the anti-Soviet cold warriors have a certain Dr. Strangelove value to them, one that even in 1960s America wasn’t fully taken seriously, the anti-Russian racists have been spreading vile propaganda in the west for centuries.
To these people, Russians are barbaric by design. They are expendable and their country is fit to be used by western powers as they see fit. This attitude reached a fevered pitch during the so-called ‘Great Game’ between Britain and Russia in the mid to late 19th century.
The kind of propaganda spouted at that time held that Russians have no culture, no education, no civilisation and most importantly, that Orthodox Christianity is an inferior faith vis-à-vis varieties of Western Christianity. This was said in spite of Orthodoxy’s direct relationship to the Ancient Church.
This attitude was later elevated to the realm of pseudoscience when Sir Halford John Mackinder proposed that Russia ought to be used as a geographical pivot region that the west must control in order to better dominate the Orient. According to such people, Russia wasn’t even worthy of colonising, it was simply a geographical motorway that ought to be pacified in order to get to the final destination.
These ideas were refined and consequently became highly dangerous under the Nazis. Hitler sought Lebensraum or living space for the German race. In order to accomplish this, Slavic populations, mainly Russians, needed to be eliminated so Hitler could use the land to provide resources for the Germanic races.
Although few of the ‘Putin Did It’ brigade openly associate themselves with Hitler, their attitudes have a similar origin. It is a deep set attitude whereby those of western European lineage and those of a Western Christian persuasion feel they are implicitly superior to Russians, black people, Jewish people, Orthodox Christians, Arabs, all Asian people and native peoples of the Americas and Oceania. Russia is the safest target for them because of the power and unity of the Russian state. But do not be fooled. These people are old fashioned western racists, they’re just more careful about whom they openly insult these days.
3. THE BORING, WILFULLY IGNORANT LIBERAL
‘Putin isn’t a liberal therefor he MUST be bad’: so goes the mantra of those who talk about Russia in a negative light and blame them for everything from the local health food shop running out of inedible garbage to the fact that their loser kids failed a recent maths exam.
For them, Russia has a DUTY to be a neo-liberal state, because that’s just the way the world should be. There’s a weirdly racist element to this thinking. Because they see Russia as a nation of ‘white people,’ they expect Russia to do as European countries do and embrace the post-identity liberal way where to quote the song Lola by The Kinks ‘Girls will be boys and boys will be girls It’s a mixed up muddled up shook up world’.
They are incensed not by Russia’s alleged lack of democracy but because Russia is too democratic and actively choose to do things the Russian way rather than the liberal European way. Of course this doesn’t fit the narrative, so in their minds, Putin is forcing Russians to have what they want in a totally undemocratic way.
If you’re looking for logic, don’t attempt a conversation with one of these liberals. These people know almost nothing about Russia, they simply cannot believe anyone who looks vaguely white wouldn’t want to be like good European liberals. Therefore it must be due to ‘oppression’.
The insincerity of their pseudo-compassion is easily exposed. Most of these people reckon they are Putin experts and can tell you made up stories concerning everything you need to know about Putin from his childhood to his present attempts to ‘rig the election’.
Less familiar to such people will be the names, Alexander Yakovlev, Yegor Gaidar and Anatoly Chubais. These people are often wilfully ignorant that western bandits like George Soros acted in collusion with Russian traitors in the 1990s to stave the Russian people. When they hear that in the liberal 1990s, young men were committing suicide left and right, the elderly were starving and homeless, young girls who would have been teachers, scientists, athletes or musicians were forced into prostitution; they just tend to cover their ears. To them, the precious liberal narrative is more convenient than the truth of what Russia’s neo-liberal experiment did to the lives of ordinary Russians.
So go on, ignore reality, and don’t choke on your gluten free smoothie. Keep calm and remember no matter the problem, ‘Putin did it’.
4. THE ‘CAN’T HAPPEN HERE’ TRUE BELIEVER
Unlike the previous groups, I almost pity these people. These are the people who were brought up to believe ‘the west is the best’. In the west the newspapers tell the truth and in other places they are full of lies. Western politicians are honourable men and women who go into public service to enhance the lives of their countrymen. In the west there is free speech and everywhere else there isn’t. In the west, everyone is honest.
These people are confounded to lean that western powers are as bad or worse than the faraway places they’ve grown up thinking are vastly underdeveloped and backward vis-à-vis the west. These people still believe the myth even though the age of Wikileaks, new media like The Duran and RT, social media and an inter-connected world, has made such beliefs increasingly difficult to maintain.
For them, the clichés about ‘truth justice and the American (or French, or British, or Swedish or Dutch) way’ must be clung onto because it makes them feel safe in the world and absolves them of any guilt for voting for war criminals and con-artists.
5. HILLARY CLINTON
She really does deserve her own category. Seneca once said, “Religion is regarded by the common people as true, by the wise as false, and by the rulers as useful”. This quote goes a long way in explaining the modus-operandi of Hillary Clinton. She will say anything to anyone in order to gain some sort of electoral, economic or general political advantage.
I truly believe that Hillary Clinton knows that Putin did NOT do it. But she has found a way to simultaneously exploit stupid liberals, wicked racists, old Cold Warriors and true believers. It was only after Trump and Putin said some vaguely positive things about one another that Hillary Clinton began blaming Putin for all of her own ills and beyond her, those of the wider world.
This demonstrates that the ‘Putin did it’ line is a child of opportunism rather than ideology. Had Trump and the leaders of China said vaguely positive things about each other ‘China did it’ could have easily been her go-to mantra.
However, Hillary Clinton underestimated Donald Trump. To quote George W. Bush, perhaps she even ‘misunderestimated’ Trump. Where many less independent minded leaders would have buckled under pressure and eventually said, ‘yes Putin is bad, sorry Mrs. Hillary you can spank me now’, Trump stuck to his principles and he ought to be lauded for it.
Trump has consistently said that whilst he doesn’t have a relationship with Putin he would like a good one because, cooperation between superpowers is better than conflict, because a common policy on ISIS is better than a hypocritical and confused one and because Putin is a man who inherently commands respect, something which Donald Trump finds rightly admirable.
The moral of the story is, Hillary Clinton can fool a lot of the people a lot of the time but she cannot fool everybody all of the time. Donald Trump’s indefatigability has made this especially so.
So there you have it. Your ‘Putin Did It’ survival guide. I have a feeling that over the next week it will be increasingly useful.
Origins of images: Facebook, Twitter, Wikimedia, Wikipedia, Flickr, Google, Imageinjection, Public Domain & Pinterest.
Read our Disclaimer/LegalStatement!
DonatetoSupportUs
We would like to ask you to consider a small donation to help our team keep working. We accept no advertising and rely only on you, our readers, to keep us digging the truth on history, global politics and international relations.
Since terrorism’s tragedy is again in the news, it is timely to revisit perhaps one of the biggest acts of terrorism in modern history – the illegal invasion and destruction – ongoing – of Iraq.March 20th marked the thirteenth anniversary of an action resulting in the equivalent of a Paris, Brussels, London 7th July 2005, often multiple times daily in Iraq ever since. As for 11th September 2001, there has frequently been that death toll and heart break every several weeks, also ongoing.America and Britain have arguably engaged in and generated the legacy of one of the longest recorded attacks ...
One of the most ingenious propaganda weapons ever developed is that the powerful nations of the West—led by the United States—have a moral responsibility to use military force to protect the rights of people being repressed by their governments. This “responsibility to protect” (R2P) always had a dubious legal standing, but its moral justification also required a psychological and historical disengagement from the bloody reality of the 500-hundred-year history of U.S. and European colonialism, slavery, genocide and torture that created the “West.”This violent, lawless Pan-European colonial/capitalist project continues today under the hegemony of the U.S. empire. This then begs the ...
The former editor of the Tribune de Genève, [Guy Mettan-RI] visited Moscow and presented his new book Russia and the West: A Thousand Year War, which reviews the phenomenon of Russophobia: its roots, historical evolution and modern incarnations. Izvestia had a chance to interview him.What inspired you to write about this? There are two reasons why I began this work. The first is a personal, family reason. In 1994, my wife and I adopted a Russian girl, who now is now 25. Her name is Oksana, and she is from the Vladimir region. After we adopted her, I became interested ...
History and geopoliticsThe extreme geopolitical importance of Russia in global politics and international relations is seen as the best from the very basic facts about Russian geography.Russian Federation is a state in North East Asia and East Europe which is bordering Norway and Finland in the north, Poland in the north-west, Estonia, Latvia, and Lithuania in the Baltics, Belarus, and Ukraine in the west, Georgia and Azerbaijan in the Caucasus, and Kazakhstan, Mongolia, China, and North Korea in the south. Russia’s maritime borders meet the Baltic Sea, the Black Sea, the Caspian Sea, the Arctic, and finally the Pacific Ocean. ...
“Religion is the sigh of the oppressed creature, the heart of a heartless world, and the soul of soulless conditions. It is the opium of the people.” So Karl Marx wrote in 1843. For three generations over the course of the 20th century his atheist disciples violently sought to break their subjects of this “opium” addiction.They failed. In many though not all parts of the former communist bloc Christianity not only survived but provided the impetus for national and social revival. In some countries, like Poland, Hungary, and Lithuania, this meant Roman Catholicism. In others, like Russia, Ukraine, Serbia, and ...
The edifice of the post-1991 world order is collapsing right before our eyes. President Putin’s decision to give a miss to the Auschwitz pilgrimage, right after his absence in Paris at Charlie festival, gave it the last shove. It was good clean fun to troll Russia, as long as she stayed the course. Not anymore. Russia broke the rules.Until now, Russia, like a country bumpkin in Eton, tried to belong. It attended the gathering of the grandees where it was shunned, paid its dues to European bodies that condemned it, patiently suffered ceaseless hectoring of the great powers and irritating baiting of the East European small-timers alike. But something broke there. The lad does ...
The US has always been a warfare state. However, the character of US imperialist warfare has changed dramatically. For over two centuries, the US regime’s purpose for war, whether on indigenous peoples, Black people, or nations all over the world, was to expand the productive forces of capitalist exploitation. War preceded the vast profits accumulated from chattel slavery, land grab, and resource extraction in Africa, Asia, and Latin America. The foundation of white supremacy and capitalism allowed the US regime to consolidate its expansion despite episodes of periodic crisis. Recent events, alongside a steady fall in the rate of capitalist profit, indicate ...
On January 20, the Turkish military began an invasion of the Kurdish-controlled Afrin region in northern Syria. Turkey’s government has declared that its operation aims “to preserve Syria’s territorial integrity,” remove “terrorist elements,” and protect civilians.The Independent, however, published the first Western media report from Afrin, and Robert Fisk reports that the list of dead includes infants. “One-year old Wael al-Hussein, a refugee…was killed on 21 January, six-year old Moussab al-Hussein from Idlib (clearly from another refugee family) on the same day,” he writes.Many journalists in Turkey, in the meanwhile, are rubbing their hands. Necati Doğru, a columnist with one ...
Or at the very least, an incipient monarchy: the only problem is that the monarch — while having plenty of clothes — has no head.The most famous twentieth century American journalist, Bob Woodward, who together with his buddy Carl Bernstein broke the Watergate story that forced President Richard Nixon to resign, has written a book that reveals White House palace intrigues worthy of any European king — although it is the French President, Emanuel Macron, who calls himself Jupiter.Under the ominous title Fear, Woodward quotes high-ranking members of the White House staff as well as the heads of crucial departments ...
Destroyed Serbian Orthodox church in Kosovo by local Muslim Albanians after 1999In 2000, when George W. Bush was elected president in a controversial and hotly disputed election, all the experts and pundits predicted that there would be a philosophical sea change in US foreign policy in the Balkans, and in Kosovo in particular. In my 2000 analysis of the election of Bush and US foreign policy in Kosovo, however, I concluded that the George W. Bush Administration represented the same old same old and business as usual. In my viewpoint, absolutely nothing would change in the US foreign policy stance ...
GR Editor’s Note: This incisive article was written on April 30, 2003, by historian and political scientist Jacques Pauwels. A timely question: Why Does Hillary Want War… ? And why do people support her? * * *Wars are a terrible waste of lives and resources, and for that reason most people are in principle opposed to wars. The American President, on the other hand, seems to love war. Why? Many commentators have sought the answer in psychological factors. Some opined that George W. Bush considered it his duty to finish the job started, but for some obscure reason ...
Sultan Abdul Hamid II, in the face of a rising secular nationalism in the late 1800s, that culminated in the Young Turk movement, tried to restore the influence of the Ottoman Empire among Islamic nations and the Empire’s many peoples by stressing the importance of Islam and the Ottoman Caliphate, of the role of the Ottomans as the protectors of Islam and, in the modern world, a bulwark against western colonialism.Over a hundred years after he left power, after the Empire was broken up by the western powers after the First World War, after the Turkish nationalists under Mustafa Kemal, ...
America’s war of expansion over Mexico, backed by newspapers and politicians, has repercussions to the present day.Reflecting on his life while dying of throat cancer in 1885, the former US President Ulysses S. Grant said the Mexican-American War was, “the most wicked war in history. I thought so at the time, when I was a youngster, only I had not moral courage enough to resign”.Grant had first-hand experience as he himself fought in the Mexican-American War (1846-1848), then as a junior officer in his mid-20s. Less than two decades later, he rose to prominence as one of the most important ...
Israel’s Maariv newspaper has revealed that the government of the Zionist state is planning to drop a political bombshell in the coming weeks by presenting a bill in the Knesset (parliament) calling for the annexation of land occupied since 1967. It is likely to have the support of the majority of Knesset members. The newspaper added that the right wing has chosen this time for the move ahead of the US presidential election; America, it is believed, will be too preoccupied to care about what is happening in the occupied Palestinian territories.Preliminary talks about a first stage have been held, ...
The two most militarily powerful nations in the West, both free to project naval power and maritime domination anywhere in the world, get together to punish and overthrow regimes they find guilty of human rights abuses and political repression in the name of human rights and promoting democracy: What could possibly go wrong?It is of course NATO Secretary-General Jens Stoltenberg’s new call for NATO, which has already over the past decade exercised its nation-building and promotion of enlightened regime policies with such brilliant success in Ukraine, Libya, Syria and Afghanistan to spread its mantle of protection, enlightenment and peace over ...
Part I, Part II, Part III, Part IV, Part VA follow-up of Professor Vladimir Kozin’s comments on NATO’s Fact Sheet about relations with Russia published in December 2014. The topics to be covered in this part:NATO’s operation in Afghanistan was a failure;The NATO-led mission in Afghanistan failed to stop the Afghan drugs trade;NATO’s operation over Libya was illegitimate;NATO’s operation over Kosovo was illegitimate;The cases of Kosovo and Crimea are identical;Russia’s annexation of Crimea was justified;The Ukrainian authorities are illegitimate.NATO’s operation in Afghanistan was a failureNATO claim: NATO took over the command of the UN-mandated International Security Assistance Force in Afghanistan ...
Editor’s note:This article by Michel Collon was first published by Global Research in December 2003. It outlines with foresight the strategy of the US, through covert intelligence operations, of breaking up Iraq into a number of separate states. The unleashing of a civil war with a view to deliberately breaking up Iraq was part of the US war agenda from the outset.They have found the solution! Divide Iraq into three mini-states and then pit them against one another. Does that remind you of something else? Oh, yes! It’s not the first time something like this happened….The New York Times published ...
Origins of images: Facebook, Twitter, Wikimedia, Wikipedia, Flickr, Google, Imageinjection, Public Domain & Pinterest.Read our Disclaimer/Legal Statement!Donate to Support UsWe would like to ask you to consider a small donation to help our team keep working. We accept no advertising and rely only on you, our readers, to keep us digging the truth on history, global politics and international relations.[wpedon id="4696" align="left"]Save
CNN explained well “5 surprising lessons from Trump’s astonishing win”, and the historic crushing failure of traditional Presidential-year American politics, but it really boils down to one simple fact: In the battleground states, where most of the advertising dollars and get-out-the-vote money was being spent, the Trump organization made use of the Republican-Party organization in those portions of the campaign-operation that benefited from those established contacts and its tried-and-tested methods and techniques, but not in the portions of the campaign-operation that needed to be improved and to function better than in all prior U.S. Presidential elections.The simple fact is that ...
This past weekend saw Russians parading in celebration of the anniversary of their costly victory over Nazi Germany. Millions marched throughout Russia, holding photographs of their fallen family members in bittersweet remembrance. To this archival research peoples historian’s knowledge there was no public reminder that Hitler’s armed forces were built up by the West in open violation of the Versailles Treaty’s prohibitions in expectation of Hitler fulfilling his threats to invade the Soviet Union.There is simply no way impoverished Nazi Germany could have on its own built its Armed Forces up to number one military in the world during the ...
The kind of propaganda spouted at that time held that Russians have no culture, no education, no civilisation and most importantly, that Orthodox Christianity is an inferior faith vis-à-vis varieties of Western Christianity. This was said in spite of Orthodoxy’s direct relationship to the Ancient Church.
Unlike the previous groups, I almost pity these people. These are the people who were brought up to believe ‘the west is the best’. In the west the newspapers tell the truth and in other places they are full of lies. Western politicians are honourable men and women who go into public service to enhance the lives of their countrymen. In the west there is free speech and everywhere else there isn’t. In the west, everyone is honest.
