Lots of examples of Putin honoring the Christian faith. Not one, that I've seen, of him bowing to a muslim leader.
Posted on 03/22/2014 2:58:38 AM PDT by No One Special
We live in strange times. The Cold War is over, yet when it comes to Russia seeking to maintain its control of Ukraine, a new group of apologists for Vladimir Putin has emerged. Once again, the group in the West supporting the hegemonic attempts of control of Ukraine by the authoritarian Putin regime is made up of stalwarts on both the Right and the Left.
Support for Putin on the Right comes from the paleoconservatives led by Pat Buchanan, the editors of The American Conservative, and the writers for the website Anti-war.com. The entire group comes from the precincts of what historians call the Old Right, a phenomenon that harks back to the old isolationism of pre World War II conservatives and the large group they organized, the America First Committee. Their motivations have been succinctly summarized by James Kirchick.
A new concern has been added to the traditional non-interventionist trope. They are favorable to much of Putin's growing domestic positions on issues such as the growing repression of gays in Russia, actions which they also look kindly upon and wish were social policy in the United States. Opposition to gay rights is combined with support for Putin's attempt to build what he calls a Christian Russia, and concern for what Buchanan sees as something greatly lacking in the secular United States. In his book Suicide of a Superpower, Buchanan titled two chapters "The End of White America" and "The Death of Christian America." He seems to be saying, "If only we had a leader in the United States with the vision of Vladimir Putin." Indeed, he asked in one column, "Is Putin One of Us?" His answer, as you have undoubtedly guessed, is yes:
Nor is [Putin] without an argument when we reflect on America's embrace of abortion on demand, homosexual marriage, pornography, promiscuity, and the whole panoply of Hollywood values.
Our grandparents would not recognize the America in which we live.
Moreover, Putin asserts, the new immorality has been imposed undemocratically.
The "destruction of traditional values" in these countries, he said, comes "from the top" and is "inherently undemocratic because it is based on abstract ideas and runs counter to the will of the majority of people."
Does he not have a point?
As he bluntly says, America is not the nation "we grew up in," and Putin sees Americans as "pagan and wildly progressive," a statement with which Buchanan obviously agrees.
On the Left, leading the charge that the neo-cons are again trying to push us into war — a charge they assert whenever anyone makes an analysis with which they do not agree — is The Nation magazine and its writers and editors. And the number-one supporter and apologist for Putin is the historian of modern Russia, Stephen Cohen of Princeton and New York University. In the past two weeks, he has been on Fareed Zakaria's TV program, on CNN, and on whatever other media outlets call upon him.
In Cohen's cover story in a recent issue of The Nation, of which his wife Katrina vanden Heuvel is both publisher and editor-in-chief, he claimed that American media coverage of Putin and Russia is "less objective, less balanced, more conformist and scarcely less ideological than when they covered Soviet Russia during the Cold War." According to Cohen, Putin has worked to support American interests in stabilizing his nuclear-armed country, assisted U.S. security interests in Afghanistan, Syria and Iran, and has magnanimously freed over 1000 political prisoners.
Evidently, Professor Cohen does not acknowledge that in Syria, for example, Putin has managed to box the U.S. into working with and bolstering the Assad regime, to which Russia constantly gives new battle-ready helicopters, and which to this day has brutally seen to the horrendous deaths of hundreds of thousands of its citizens, all brought down with Russian assistance. We are somehow supposed to believe that this is in our security interests.
Along with Putin, Cohen depicts the demonstrators in Ukraine as hardly "right-minded oppositionists," but in reality as a group whose politics are never examined and which, he implies, is most likely made up of far-Right extremists and includes fascists and anti-Semites. He believes that "a new Cold War divide between West and East may now be unfolding, not in Berlin but in the heart of Russia's historical civilization." The now ousted president of Ukraine is depicted by Cohen as presiding over a real democracy, and not anything like what he believes are the false portrayals by the historian Timothy Snyder, whose articles in The New York Review of Books paint a not-so-rosy view of the old Yanukovych regime.
To Cohen, the crisis arose only because NATO expansion in Eastern Europe forced Putin and Yanukovych to rightfully protect Russia's national interests. Moreover, U.S.-funded groups in Ukraine were interfering with domestic politics by bringing NGOs to fund democracy promotion, while trying to put provocative missile-defense installations in countries like Poland, meant to "subordinate Ukraine to NATO."
He is angry that at the Sochi Olympics, the U.S. sent a low-level delegation, which infuriated Putin because it included "retired gay athletes." How dare the United States do such a thing, knowing that Putin believes gay people should have no rights? What Obama should have done was go to Sochi himself, "either out of gratitude to Putin, or to stand with Russia's leader against international terrorists who have struck both of our countries."
Professor Cohen, we all remember, was sad at the demise of the Soviet Union. He hoped it would not collapse and that it would remain in existence under the leadership of his beloved Mikhail Gorbachev. The last Soviet leader, Cohen believed, would have created a democratic communist state built in the tradition of the purged and executed Bolshevik leader Nikolai Bukharin, of whom Cohen wrote an admiring biography.
The liberal columnist Jonathan Chait gets it correctly. Writing about those he terms Putin's "pathetic dupes," he singles out Stephen Cohen and accurately calls him "a septuagenarian, old-school leftist who has carried on the mental habits of decades of anti-anti-communism seamlessly into a new career of anti-anti-Putinism. The Cohen method is to pick away at every indictment of the Russian regime without directly associating himself with its various atrocities." It is not surprising that Cohen is frequently a guest on the Kremlin's TV propaganda outlet, Russia Today, just as he would have been welcome on Soviet stations in the Gorbachev era. In a recent radio interview, Cohen writes:
I can’t remember any Soviet communist leader being so personally villainized, that is we wrote bad things about Khrushchev, about Brezhnev, about Andropov, but we disliked them because they represented an evil system. We didn’t say them themselves were thugs, murderers, assassins, which are words that we attach to Putin.
I think Professor Cohen should look a little more, because I recall plenty of people referring to the Soviet leaders as "thugs" and worse.
The truth is that Cohen analyzes Putin just as he analyzed the Soviet Union, for which he always apologized. In an interview in the new print Newsweek (not online), Cohen said:
We hit Russia's borders under Bush because NATO was in the Baltics. Then we had this episode in Georgia in 2008 because we crossed Russia's red line in Georgia. We've crossed it in Ukraine. I don't understand why people don't see this. That if you send, over a 20-year period, a military alliance which has it's political components – includes missile defense, includes NGOs that get money from governments but are deeply involved in politics in those countries, includes the idea of revolutions on their borders — then eventually you're going to come up against a red line that, like Obama, they're going to act on.
It's the old apology for the Soviet Union by the Communists and fellow-travelers brought up to date to explain away Putin. Stalin and his minions in the West used to explain every Soviet action as a fault of "capitalist encirclement," to which the poor USSR had to act to defend itself. So Cohen believes now we "went a bridge to far" in Ukraine. Putin had to act to defend the just national interests of Russia.
As for the suppression of gays in Russia, Cohen points out they were suppressed in America when he grew up. Moreover, he says that 85 percent of Russians believe homosexuality is a disease or a choice. And there is no popular support in the country for gay rights. In other words, we may not like it, but one has to respect the feelings of the Russian public, and not inflict our values and decisions on them. He goes on to say "it's not our concern," and sarcastically remarks: "Are we supposed to form a brigade and go there and liberate Russian gays?" That is, my friend the historian of Russia Louis Menashe puts it, "reminiscent of turning back criticisms of the USSR with: “What about the Negroes lynched in the South!”
Once again, leftists like Stephen Cohen join with paleoconservatives like Pat Buchanan in opposing a stand for democracy, and in charging critics of Putin with unfairly and aggressively opposing Putin's supposed just and necessary policies. When will we learn the lessons we should have learned from the past?
Sit down and shut up while Putin takes eastern Europe and south America?
You really think that is going to benefit the US?
Lots of examples of Putin honoring the Christian faith. Not one, that I've seen, of him bowing to a muslim leader.
Buchanan is not a conservative.
You do not have to agree with an adversary to respect them.
Do you think Grant was a cheerleader for Lee? Did Montgomery cheer lead for Rommel?
Both Grant and Montgomery respected their foe, but still opposed them. I think most of us here oppose but still respect Putin. That said, I cannot help but wonder if Putin respects Obama. I also wonder if Obama "rspects" or fears Putin
No lots of cheerleaders. Posting dubious Pravda like propaganda, twisting into pretzels to deny the fact that Russia violated its word and invaded a sovereign neighbor. Making scurrilous moral equivalents between the US and Russian history. I have no problem with people recognizing Vlad is an effective tough cookie. I can’t stand the ass kissing. And there’s plenty of it.
I couldn't agree with you more.
Truthfully, it is not “apologetic” to look at Putin objectively, for what he is and what he wants to do. But you must observe the ground rules.
1) Putin is a Russian. Russia is his country. He is not an American, does not have American values, and sees America as a competitor, not an ally.
2) As leader of Russia, he puts Russia first, and tries to do things that make it stronger, if he feels he can get away with it.
3) Since the time when the Czars wrested Crimea away from the Ottoman Empire, Crimea was part of Russia. They saw it as strategically vital, because it gave Russia a warm-water port. Though Stalin enigmatically gave it to Ukraine, when the Soviet Union broke up, Ukraine had to offer that port to Russia on a very long-term lease, or, even in its weakened state, Russia would have tried to take it.
Okay, so add this together, and it should be no surprise that when the pro-Russian government of Ukraine fell, the Russians took the opportunity to snatch Crimea back.
But this being said, there is still great risk here. To start with, eastern Ukraine is heavily Russian, and a tempting target for Putin to snatch as well.
Likewise the Baltic states, importantly, *not* just Latvia, Lithuania, and Estonia, but also Finland, only gained independence from Russia after WWI, and only Finland kept theirs after WWII. They know all too well that Russia may try to eat them again.
Look into Radosh’s background, he is an “ex” communist neocon. Look into what causes he spends most of his time advocating. A google search on Radosh will quickly turn up where he is coming from — it ain’t about American patriotism.
Hatred for Russia's stance on gays doesn't just come from the left either, considering the author of this article is citing homosexual neoconservative activist James Kirchick as a rebuttal witness to Pat Buchanan.
Competitor does not necessarily mean "enemy."
It is a good question as to whether or not Putin sees the US as an enemy. It is a question of degrees. He might see the US as an obstacle, a variable, or all sorts of other things, but “enemy” is too cut and dried.
The reason most nations have foreign services is because only rarely are other nations totally friendly or totally enemy. But once the label is applied, it creates obligations.
As a competitor, Putin can haggle with the US, cooperate in some things and oppose in others. It is a more flexible position.
Nations don’t have friends, they have interests.
Just think of Churchill and Roosevelt had been friends!
And we have plenty of cheerleaders for the EU/banker oligarchs too. Neither are worth getting one American soldier killed over OR further bankrupting the US. Or perhaps economic collapse is a good thing only if its done thru militarism?
H.W. Bush, I suspect when he was in charge of the CIA, got his hands on some software of a known class, but far more complex and unique.
Police departments use similar software that is so effective, that some police brought it to Iraq during the occupation and used it to great effect against the insurgents.
What it does is collate and data mine information, and thus establish connections between suspects, events, and criminal acts. The more data you feed in, the better it gets, until you start seeing “linkages” that even brilliant analysts miss.
H.W. Bush publicly referred to “linkages” in foreign affairs, but only a few people realized what he really meant. Basically that nations have tens of thousands, often millions of connections between them; and that by manipulating some of them, you can affect seemingly unrelated connections.
Importantly, this goes way over the head of strategic analysts, like playing 3D chess when they are playing checkers. It was how he was so quickly to mobilize a coalition against Iraq in the first Gulf War.
However, he seems to have taken this software with him when he left CIA, and now it is wholly owned by the Bush family.
W. Bush used it to sweep away primary competition before he ran for office, by locking up all the big party donors. He was so confident that he ordered construction of his ranch a year out.
Sadly, it is likely that Jeb Bush has it, too, which is going to mean an incredible fight for the Tea Party to prevent him from being the nominee.
The man has done nothing but sow chaos at home and abroad that has only harmed us. I don’t believe it was done out of stupidity.
Obama is loving this Ukrainian "crisis". He's just itching to go all in with his pen and phone.
Excellent observance there. When dealing with the left, never ignore the least common denominator.
“ex” communist neocon
***********
Not a far step. Neocons are leftists who can count.
Troops for the transnationals: our final export.
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