There follows a guest post by Jon Zobenica and Benjamin Schwarz about why those dissenting from the prevailing orthodoxy about the war in Ukraine should not be smeared as traitors. Ben is the CEO of the US Free Speech Union. You can subscribe to the US FSU’s Substack newsletter here.
During the Cold War they were called comsymps, or were accused of being fellow travellers or fifth columnists or maybe just useful idiots – i.e., those who weren’t full-throated enough in their opposition to all things Soviet and whose opinions dared deviate to whatever degree from official American consensus. Senator Joseph McCarthy even referred to them as the “prancing minions of the Moscow party line,” and their deviations from consensus could – and in some cases did – get them accused of treason.
This habit of calling into question the patriotism and loyalty of those who buck consensus is back with full force, only instead of coming from the reactionary right (the likes of Senator McCarthy), such calls are coming from those in the prestige media, academe, and the current White House and State Department – much more liberal players who are merely availing themselves of McCarthyite tactics.
Fox News Channel’s Tucker Carlson has come in for particular abuse in this area. For questioning the wisdom of America’s involvement in the Ukraine conflict (given a lack of vital national interests to the United States), and for validating Russian concerns about proposed NATO expansion into Ukraine and Georgia (both former Soviet republics), Carlson has been called “America’s Most Watched Kremlin Propagandist” by Slate contributor William Saletan; has been accused of flirting with treason by Laurence Tribe, a Harvard law professor (emeritus) and former judicial advisor to President Barack Obama; and has been charged by those too numerous to count with parroting, echoing, repeating, mouthing, and so on “Putin’s talking points.” So plentiful is talk of Carlson being on Team Kremlin that one could be forgiven for thinking the slur has become something of a talking point itself.
Professor Tribe’s comments, made in a since deleted tweet posted on Monday, February 21st, were especially regrettable, coming as they did from a person of his position and training. That tweet read:
Led by Fox News Channel’s Tucker Carlson, the GOP’s Trump wing appears to be throwing its weight behind Putin. If Putin opts to wage war on our ally, Ukraine, such “aid and comfort” to an “enemy” would appear to become “treason” as defined by Article III of the U.S. Constitution.
One is tempted to joke, à la Mary McCarthy, that every word of that tweet is untrue, including and and the. Russia, whatever our prevailing national opinion on it, is not a declared enemy with whom we are at war even now, post-invasion. Ukraine, whatever our prevailing national sentiments toward it, is not an official ally. Domestic deviation from prevailing national sentiments and opinions does not come anywhere near the definition of “aid and comfort” as laid out in Article III of the Constitution.
David French – former U.S. Army major in the Judge Advocate General’s Corps, Iraq War veteran, Bronze Star recipient, and outspoken critic of the Trump wing of the GOP – had this to say in direct response to Professor Tribe’s tweet: “This is completely false. Constitutional text, history, and precedent say this is false. It’s not even in the same ballpark as the truth.” In his tweet, French linked to a page at the National Constitution Center site, where two of the centre’s scholars elucidate the treason clause, Article III:
While the Constitution’s Framers shared the centuries-old view that all citizens owed a duty of loyalty to their home nation, they included the Treason Clause not so much to underscore the seriousness of such a betrayal, but to guard against the historic use of treason prosecutions by repressive governments to silence otherwise legitimate political opposition. Debate surrounding the Clause at the Constitutional Convention thus focused on ways to narrowly define the offense, and to protect against false or flimsy prosecutions.
. . . In other words, the Constitution requires both concrete action and an intent to betray the nation before a citizen can be convicted of treason; expressing traitorous thoughts or intentions alone does not suffice.
Yet just this past Friday, February 25, former New York Senator, former Secretary of State, and former Democratic nominee for the Presidency, Hillary Clinton, was on MSNBC’s Morning Joe parroting Professor Tribe’s flimsy accusations. We need to call out “those people who are giving aid and comfort to Vladimir Putin,” Secretary Clinton thuggishly remonstrated. She criticised those who question the received foreign-policy wisdom, “who are unfortunately being broadcast by Russian media not only inside Russia but in Europe to demonstrate the division within our own country.” (Our diversity is our strength – except, apparently, when it’s not.) “We have to be much more united,” Secretary Clinton admonished us, because our national divisiveness “plays right into the ambitions” of those who would “divide and conquer the west without ever invading us but by setting us against each other.”
Those whom Secretary Clinton excoriated have very different views from hers about America’s role in the world and the motivations behind Russia’s conduct toward Ukraine. Certainly, she should strenuously challenge those views. Instead, however, she attempted to quash debate by pronouncing that her opponents’ views approximate treachery against the nation because, as she reckons, their dissent objectively – an adverb Stalinists were wont to deploy – supports the ambitions of a country she has defined as America’s enemy. This tactic used to be called red-baiting.
Secretary Clinton did bring up a good point, even if she did so unwittingly. Our national divisions have long been exploited by clever and ambitious propagandists from the Soviet Union and then from the Russian Federation. Civil Rights marchers protesting the status quo in the Jim Crow South made for great footage that highlighted American divisions and hypocrisies for Soviet Bloc audiences, all the more so when – with Gandhian sangfroid – the marchers put themselves in circumstances where they were sure to be attacked by the reactionary forces of the status quo. Would that make Martin Luther King a useful idiot or a fifth columnist? (Some on the reactionary right tried to paint him thus. And remember, this all happened during the height of the Cold War, when the great powers were competing globally for potential client states, not least among the newly independent and predominantly brown-skinned nations of the once-colonial Global South.) More recently, Russian propagandists have availed themselves of the words and actions of groups ranging from Occupy Wall Street to Black Lives Matter, words and actions that have brought to light further divisions within America – economic divisions, racial divisions, etc. Are members of groups like these culpable for the uses to which their (domestic) social and political critiques are put by foreign propaganda mills? Are they to stifle such critiques for fear of finding themselves accused, like Tucker Carlson, of flirting with treason?
Treason, of course, involves waging war against your home nation or providing aid and comfort to an enemy of your home nation in time of war. So what about those who explicitly, vociferously protested our involvement in Vietnam? In that case, American military forces were directly engaged with those of a foreign government, that of North Vietnam. The United States alleged that North Vietnam was the aggressor, having violated the border between north and south (established in 1954) by providing men and materiel to the Vietcong, who were taking up arms against an independent South Vietnam. The United States therefore entered into a military alliance with South Vietnam to repel these attacks, in a fashion that included bombing targets in North Vietnam.
Were kids who took to the streets and campuses to protest the war giving aid and comfort to the enemy? What about their moms who supported them by joining Another Mother for Peace – and such people as the former Miss America Bess Myerson, the celebrated paediatrician Dr. Benjamin Spock, and the actors Debbie Reynolds, Donna Reed, Dick van Dyke, Joanne Woodward, Paul Newman, and Lauren Bacall, all of whom actively supported those moms – were they giving aid and comfort to the enemy? Many Americans at the time thought so. Many who were alive then still do. But those protesters weren’t guilty of anything like treason, and in fact many Americans celebrated them, and still do, for the stand they took and the divisions they pried open. What, however, of Jane Fonda’s visit to a North Vietnamese anti-aircraft battery (a weapon used, of course, to shoot down American pilots, many of whom, at the time of Fonda’s visit, were being held as prisoners of war)? This was an act of commission. Unlike civil-rights and antiwar marchers, Occupy Wall Street and Black Lives Matter protesters, or Tucker Carlson, all whom might find (or have found) their words and actions put to Russian uses without their intention, Fonda traveled to enemy territory of her own volition and allowed her visit to the gun emplacement to be filmed. The footage shows her – in all her Hollywood fame – seated behind the gun sights and surrounded by applauding North Vietnamese soldiers. She looks as delighted as a birthday girl at Disneyland.
It’s not a good look, which Fonda herself came to realise. It may even have been somewhat comforting to the North Vietnamese, though nowhere near to the degree that it was distressing to Americans. Whatever the case, Jane Fonda was never charged with treason. Many despise her for what she did, just as many despise Tucker Carlson for what he does. But our culture and our society have found ways to coexist with them both, and even to let them thrive. It is by far the better option than dumbing down our concept of treason, the better to set upon each other’s throats. That’s the very divisiveness and national self-destruction that Secretary Clinton, with one breath, claims to fear and, with the other, exacerbates with her loose talk about giving “aid and comfort” to Vladimir Putin.
Some words must be said about these Putin talking points people are supposedly parroting; for Tucker Carlson isn’t alone in finding himself so charged. Several weeks ago, President Joe Biden’s White House Press Secretary, Jen Psaki, accused Republican Senator Josh Hawley, of Missouri, of “digesting Russian misinformation and . . . parroting the talking points of Russian propagandist leaders.” (This came as a result of Hawley’s suggesting that, for strategic reasons, the United States should consider withdrawing its commitment to expanding NATO into Ukraine.) At nearly the same time, State Department spokesperson Ned Price leveled the following remark at an Associated Press reporter (after being rankled by the reporter’s unyielding skepticism regarding a report Price had just made about alleged Russian misinformation): “If you doubt the credibility of the U.S. government . . . and want to find solace in information that the Russians are putting out, that is for you to do.”
The unavoidable takeaway from all this is that parroting isn’t the actual problem in the eyes of officialdom. In fact parroting is preferred, almost insisted on. But you must parrot Us, officialdom asserts. Anything less, and we’ll accuse you of parroting Them. Not only is this incompatible with the principles we presume to stand for at home and abroad (those relating to freedom of speech, an independent and even adversarial press, etc.), but it also betrays an ignorance of the long public debate around foreign policy as it relates to Russia. Working backwards chronologically, here are but a few highlights from that debate.
In a 2016 then President Obama said, “The fact is that Ukraine, which is a non-NATO country, is going to be vulnerable to military domination by Russia no matter what we do.” He added that “we have to be very clear about what our core interests are and what we are willing to go to war for.” One can agree or disagree with these assessments. But at the time they were offered, it probably didn’t occur to those who now find Russian disinformation hidden in every lampshade to claim that President Obama was naught but a Kremlin mouthpiece.
In 2015, John J. Mearsheimer, a University of Chicago professor of political science (and a West Point graduate), gave a lecture titled “The Causes and Consequences of the Ukraine Crisis.”
In that lecture, he cited the 2008 Bucharest Summit (in which NATO pledged to one day incorporate Ukraine and Georgia) as a proximate cause of the 2008 war in Georgia and a contributing cause of Russia’s 2014 annexation of the Crimea and its military support of pro-Russian forces in eastern Ukraine.
The Bucharest Summit Declaration, from April 3rd, 2008, reads in part: “NATO welcomes Ukraine’s and Georgia’s Euro-Atlantic aspirations for membership in NATO. We agreed today that these countries will become members of NATO.” Reflecting the Russian foreign-policy consensus, Vladimir Putin has consistently said that he would never allow that to happen, that such an action would be considered a direct threat to Russia. And Professor Mearsheimer doesn’t wonder why, reminding us that the United States has for two hundred years proclaimed the rights of a hegemon within its own hemisphere (via the Monroe Doctrine), that we have spent more than sixty years in a state of pique over the fact that a socialist (and, for a long time, Soviet-allied) Cuba sits just off our southern shore, and that we would never allow, say, Canada or Mexico to enter into a military alliance with Russia or China against us. Ukraine, as both Professor Mearsheimer and President Obama note, is a core interest of Russia’s. It is less obviously of vital national importance to the United States. It was not treasonous for Professor Mearsheimer and President Obama to say so, and it’s not treasonous for Tucker Carlson to do so either.
One is free to agree or disagree with the geopolitical and historical analysis offered by Mearsheimer – analysis largely echoed by such disparate figures as the British historian and sociologist Perry Anderson; the former U.S. Ambassador to Russia Jack Matlock; the historian and foreign-policy expert Ronald Steel; the editorial director and publisher of the Nation, Katrina vanden Heuvel; her late husband, the historian of Russia Stephen F. Cohen; the British Russia scholar and journalist Anatol Lieven; the former New Republic columnist Robert Wright; the MIT political scientists Barry R. Posen and Stephen Van Evera; the Texas A&M political scientist Christopher Layne; and the Pulitzer Prize-winning former New York Times Moscow Bureau Chief David K. Shipler – but such analysis long predates Tucker Carlson’s supposedly treasonous broadcasts on the Fox News Channel. In fact, such analysis long predates Vladimir Putin’s involvement in world affairs.
In 1959, no less towering a figure in twentieth-century American diplomacy than George F. Kennan joined a debate with former Secretary of State Dean Acheson in the pages of Foreign Affairs magazine, on the subject of potential U.S. military disengagement from western Europe. Kennan was one of the architects of America’s containment policy vis-à-vis the Soviet Union, but as he made clear in Foreign Affairs, such a policy – in his eyes – had been aimed at improving America’s negotiating position, from which containment (and its inherent tensions) might eventually be eased in favour of compromise solutions and a more lasting and stable peace, for both the United States and the Soviet Union, and for the nations of both eastern and western Europe. The policy as he imagined it was never meant to be permanent. “Perhaps the deepest issue at stake in this whole problem of disengagement,” Kennan wrote, “resolves around this point.”
Kennan’s article was written against the backdrop of, among other things, ongoing tensions over West Berlin and the crushed Hungarian uprising of 1956 – events that in the eyes of Kennan’s opponents militated against his proposals for disengagement. Kennan made sure to note, however, that it was also written against the backdrop of ongoing U.S. military presence in West Germany, of West Germany’s then recent (1955) admission into NATO, and of the absence of any agreement regarding the diplomatic status of nations that might manage to extricate themselves from the Soviet Bloc. “The sharpness of the challenge which was presented to Soviet interests,” Kennan wrote,
was heightened by the fact that any Soviet withdrawal in the face of the respective pressures would have had the nature of a forced unilateral retreat unattended by any comparable concessions, or indeed by any concessions at all, on the Western side. Not only would a yielding to pressures of this sort have been immediately humiliating, but there was the further danger, against which Moscow had no visible protection, that territories thus released from participation in the Warsaw Pact might end up by joining the Atlantic Alliance [i.e., NATO], thus effecting a major alteration in the world balance of power. [Emphasis added.]
One didn’t have to be sympathetic to Soviet designs to see how unacceptable such a lopsided eventuality would be to the Kremlin. Yet, as Kennan noted, Soviet behavior in response to such proposed lopsidedness was characterized by many as mere Soviet aggression. Nor was it realistic, Kennan continued, to assume that the Soviets would view their own interests and security in precisely the terms the United States conceived of those matters for them. Ergo, the Soviets “will be unlikely to regard as a fit subject of negotiation a mere retraction of their power in favor of the extension to . . . Eastern Europe of the international military, political and economic arrangements now prevailing, under American aegis or encouragement, in the western half of the continent.”
Replace the word Soviet with the word Russian in the following, and you have a perfectly melancholy comment on the current crisis in Ukraine: “We may be paying, here, a bitter price for our tendency over the whole span of Western-Soviet relations to dismiss all Soviet ideological statements as ‘just propaganda,’ and to discuss with Soviet leaders everything but the main thing.”
Given his perspective and reasoning, it’s no wonder that four decades later Kennan characterised America’s push to expand NATO eastward – a policy, contrary to repeated U.S. pledges made to Russian officials at the end of the Cold War, that Russia today sees as prompting the current crisis in Ukraine – as “the most fateful error of American policy in the post cold-war era. Such a decision may be expected . . . to impel Russian foreign policy in directions decidedly not to our liking.” Once again, wise people can disagree – and have disagreed – with such analysis as Kennan’s. One could argue that it is misguided or even dangerous. It is certainly not truth beyond questioning. But neither is it disinformation or misinformation. It is intelligently conceived and articulated information, of the sort that is vital to informed debate and an informed citizenry. And an informed citizenry is never more important than in times of national and even global tension, when prudence and the consideration of complex realities must not give way to Manichaean passions and simple if stirring invocations of “values.”
As Kennan wrote in Foreign Affairs, “National interest, not sentiment or emotion, forms the normal basis for policy; and nations must not be expected to ignore the most vital of their own interests.” It is a view that has been expressed as well by everyone from President Obama to Charles de Gaulle, who famously remarked, in essence, that no nation has friends, only interests.
Cold and unsentimental that may be, but it is not a new idea, and again, it has been voiced by people all over the political spectrum, including – yes, more recently – Tucker Carlson. That such an idea is now being recast as treasonous indicates a great and alarming degradation of American discourse, and an even more alarming instinct to stifle debate when debate is most needed. That such degradation and such instinct to chill speech are emanating from high officialdom, the prestige press, and academe bodes ill for free and informed expression in the United States right now. Alas, our history is replete with instances – from the Alien and Sedition Acts through the wholesale destruction of civil liberties during the First World War, from the witch hunts of the early Cold War to President George W. Bush’s press secretary Ari Fleisher’s warning that “people should watch what they say” when questioning the Global War on Terror – of a pathological tendency to suppress dissent and to demand conformity by conflating criticism of national policy with disloyalty or treason. That we presume to embody values that must be defended abroad but that we can’t tolerate at home reveals something fraudulent – wilfully blind and potentially dangerous – in our amour propre.
Discussion
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Its not so much a question of treason as appeasment as practiced in the UK by Neville Chamberlain if we in the west do nothing. Like Putin, Hitler took over countries by bloody armed force and was allowed to do it while building stronger armed forces to attack more countries. What is happening with Putin now has very strong similarites to what Hitler was doing in the 30’s, he is a similar dictator who removes all opposition in his own country. Just because countries bordering Russia do not want to be controlled by Putin’s brand of dictatorship once they become independant, this should be their right. its clear from what has happened in Crimea and some othe countries arround Russia’s border that Putin is a threat to them and he has not accepted that they are no longer part of what was the Soviet Union. It is not unreasonable that these threatened countries should want to be part of Nato and/or the EU. None of them have been a threat to Russia and it is possible to put restrictions on Nato armaments in such a way that they could not be installed there unless there was clear military aggresion towards… Read more »
So here we go again, lurching from one rapidly wearing-out crisis to the next just as the people are starting to wake up, and before there’s time to react, go after and hang the lot of them. There will come a time when we grow weary of living in a constant state of manufactured terror, whipped up by a dishonest and dishonourable press. So many of them. Do we have enough lamp-posts in the whole of Britain?
I detect some cognative dissonance here which has also been noted by other commentators below. If you are a Daily Sceptic, then a sceptic you must remain. Much Covid scepticism, for which we are grateful, has come from dissident Conservative Party MPs, journalists and supporters but when the bugle call sounds many by their nature are inclined to get in line. I have always subscribed to Prof. Mattias Desmet’s concept of “Mass Formation” since I became aware of it last autumn and the idea of an external “evil” other is one of the drivers behind mass formation and its cousin, tribalism. As they say, the first casualty of war is truth. Be sceptical, be very sceptical.
A constant sceptic is a contrarian, a tiresome beast. Sometimes your senses should tell you that scepticism isn’t warranted. If that never happens then you are becoming paranoid and need to seek help.
Put simply, current Western governments have lost all credibility.
I do not condone the Russian invasion but why doesn’t anyone mention the eight years of shelling in the Donbas region by the Ukrainian government? Between 10,000 and 14,000 civilians were killed. Why doesn’t anyone mention the abolition of Russian and Hungarian languages in the country: imagine if they decided to abolish either the Flemish or the French language in Belgium?
Those fall into the category of “inconvenient truths”. They mess up the narrative that points the way our ruling elites want us to travel
Can’t have that. The modern west is all about silencing any words or voices that threaten the narrative.
Censorship and intolerance of dissent are the values we fight to defend, nowadays.
The Donbas region is part of Ukraine. What government on Earth would react to the takeover of part of its territory with a shrug?
So deliberately firing shells into schools and residential areas of their own citizens for eight years will teach them a lesson for wanting to speak their own language?
Evidence?
One only needs to do an internet search oneself, but this is from Reuters two weeks ago (before the invasion):
Ukrainian government forces and pro-Russian separatists have been fighting in the Donbass region of eastern Ukraine since 2014 in a conflict that Kyiv says has claimed some 15,000 lives.
If it wasn’t for the way the West terrorised and abused its people over Covid I may well have believed what the governments stooges were saying about Russia and Ukraine. I do my own thinking now and question everything rather than assume the government has my interests at heart.
Multiple long paragraphs of sophistry don’t alter the fact that if you are pro individual freedom and democracy you must support Ukraine and condemn Russia. It may not be treason to take the opposite view but it does mark you out as a supporter of oppression.
“Multiple long paragraphs of sophistry don’t alter the fact that if you are pro individual freedom and democracy you must support Ukraine and condemn Russia. “
Why?
Whether the Ukraine is dominated by its Russian speaking or its Ukrainian speaking groups has no signficance in itself for anyone but them.
But whether the Ukraine is incorporated into the US sphere woke borg, and used as another base to threaten, subvert and coerce one of the few remaining relatively independent power centres in the world is probably quite signficant for freedom generally.
So Russia is a bastion of freedom, whereas independent democracies are in some kind of US dominated “borg” hive? I do not find your argument persuasive, since it is based on lies.
Fantasies about “bastions of freedom” and “independent democracies” are far more misleading than hyperbole about the intolerant woke borg that is modern US sphere culture and politics.
Go to Canada and explain to someone whose bank account has been frozen for donating to a protest group, or who has been beaten, arrested, criminalised and had his business destroyed for protesting, that he lives in a “bastion of freedom”.
In the end, though, the realities of power in the world are not affected by these debating tactics.
Your arguments are pure whataboutery. Yes, Canada isn’t great at the moment, but Trudeau’s enemies don’t get poisoned or fall out of high windows. Admiration for a “strong” leader like Putin because he doesn’t tolerate wokeness is contemptible.
“Your arguments are pure whataboutery. “
Accusations of “whataboutery” are the traditional resort of the liar and hypocrite who wants to be able to eat the cake and still have it.
When someone like you comes along and says “we must fight that country because they broke the law” it’s absolutely legitimate to say “but what about the fact that the most powerful country in the world ignores those supposed laws, showing that those laws, as a matter of objective fact, don’t exist in any meaningful sense”?
And when someone comes along like you to divide the world between “bastions of freedom” (the countries whose cultures and/or policies you happen to like) and nasty, unacceptable “others”, it’s absolutely legitimate to point to the failings of those “bastions of freedom” and note that the differences you insist upon as supposedly fundamental are actually at best matters of degree.
“Whataboutery”? Perhaps, but only if “whataboutery” is actually a perfectly legitimate thing to engaged in.
You use too many words. This situation really is very simple, and you are supporting the oppressor.
Ooops sorry pressed the wrong button
Let’s hope Putin is more careful!
This is all very well, but how do US policy errors give carte blanche for one country to invade another? The ‘threat’ of NATO is a straw man argument. It’s a defensive organisation and would never be so stupid as to attack a country as heavily armed, and with nuclear weapons, as Russia.
But I guess if you are an intellectually and vertically challenged, paranoid leader who rules through fear in his own country, thinks nothing of assassinating his opponents, both in Russia and overseas, who jails his opponents on trumped up charges, who uses his position to indulge in kleptocracy on a grand scale to feather his own personal nest and is delusional then any argument will do?
“This is all very well, but how do US policy errors give carte blanche for one country to invade another?“
They don’t. But for those who base their opinions about the world on reality rather than on concocted, self-serving propaganda fantasy, they can give a perfectly adequate explanation.
“The ‘threat’ of NATO is a straw man argument. It’s a defensive organisation and would never be so stupid as to attack a country as heavily armed, and with nuclear weapons, as Russia.”
So many people in the US sphere just flat ignorant of history. In 1998 NATO waged an illegal war of aggression against Yugoslavia, basically because that country was not in step with US sphere policies and attitudes. Even the subsequent House of Commons inquiry was unable to bring itself to pretend that the war was legal, and had to settle for insisting it was right anyway (surprise, surprise):
“we conclude that NATO’s military action, if of dubious legality in the current state of international law, was justified on moral grounds.“
You need to understand that NATO does not look as cuddly and cosy from Russia as it does from the US sphere. Here again are the crucial words of… Read more »
How NATO looks to a paranoid Russia struggling with its post-Soviet status should not be Ukraine’s problem. Ukraine’s independent status is guaranteed by treaties signed by Russia, which Putin has broken. It is Russia that’s the rogue state.
“How NATO looks to a paranoid Russia struggling with its post-Soviet status should not be Ukraine’s problem.”
Clearly Russia is not the paranoid one here, given the history of the past 30 years. You merely choose to close your eyes to reality, and live in the cosy fantasy built for you by the forces that have waged one murderous war of aggression after another.
“Ukraine’s independent status is guaranteed by treaties signed by Russia, which Putin has broken. It is Russia that’s the rogue state.“”
Again, advocates for the superpower that has waged repeated illegal wars of aggression around the world have no standing to call any country responding to the clear threat from that superpower either “paranoid” or “rogue”.
The US is the state that has essentially torn up the supposed “rules based global order” by systematically refusing to be bound by those rules, in Yugoslavia, in Iraq, in Libya, in Syria….
The idea of replacing power realities with a rules based global order might be tempting, for those who think it plausible even as a possibility. But the first prerequisite for imposing such an order must be that it is followed at least by the most powerful. That… Read more »
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=X6YeIM85SJg&ab_channel=islandonlinenews
Vladimir Putin – “Empire of Lies” Speech – Full – February 24, 2022
I agree with Putin’s analysis here, especially on the role of US and US allies – to the shame of the British.
Putin exposed the fraudulent American/NATO war machine for what it really is; a one-world-leadership, blood thirsty, greedy force that wants to dominate the entire globe, regardless of the interests of other cultures.
“…. blood thirsty, greedy force that wants to dominate the entire globe, regardless of the interests of other cultures”
You just described Communism.
Kennan wrote some rubbish, regardless of the rights or wrongs of Putin.
The Soviet Union didn’t have interests, it was an outlaw state, a totalitarian and genocidal hellhole.
I see the RT website and access on YouTube has now been blocked in the UK. Who will be next? So much for the pretence of free speech !
Welcome to the brave new British regime. God help us.
If you want to watch RT, go to Russia.
Tucker Carlson easily stands out from his “talking head” peers because he challenges “authorized” narratives on a nightly basis. This is also why so many powerful forces want him off the air. However, the fact he says what he says also explains his No. 1 TV ratings.
Conclusion: Lots of people like someone who challenges the narrative. This happens to be the same reason The Daily Skeptic’s audience has grown so rapidly … So brave “contrarian” commentary and journalism is not as unpopular – or harmful to your career – as some would want us to believe.
Being contrarian just for the sake of it gets to be tiresome.
I have lived all over and none of it is accurate. The real beauty of the situation is that much od the world wants to welcome the Anglo-American spirit. The unperverted variety.We just need to stay strong and happy .
The author of this sage essay writes of a “pathological tendency to suppress dissent and to demand conformity by conflating criticism of national policy with disloyalty or treason.”
Forget global geopolitics. Think instead about Covid policies. Are people who criticize or challenge the “authorized” narratives being silenced, bullied, vilified and accused of treasonous behavior or heretic thinking?
Of course they/we are. Censorship of any views that dissent from the approved narrative seems to be the real Orwellian goal here.
The point is Ukraine has no strategic importance to USA or UK, but it has for Russia.
So it’s a cost/benefit analysis. Is the benefit to Russia greater than the cost of intervention? Well only Russia can calculate that, but as far as USA & UK are concerned, since there is no benefit the cost of intervention is unjustifiable.
Sanctions may hurt Russia, but they hurt us to – for what benefit?
So let’s stop emoting about plucky Ukraine being bullied by Russia, and face the pragmatic – it’s not our business; it’s a cost to us without a pay-off. And of course it will be the American & British citizens who are made poorer, not Boris and Brandon.
What is Ukraine’s strategic importance to Russia? To act as a “buffer state”, condemning the country to seconda-class status to satisfy Russia’s paranoia? Geographical proximity to a bullying nation is a reason to encourage membership of a defensive alliance, not prevent it.
You can rail against reality all you like, and insist that states “should not” prioritise their own security over your selectively applied ideals, but that won’t make the US drop the Monroe Doctrine, nor will it make Russia decide that it was wrong all along to feel threatened by an openly hostile and aggressive superpower, that has repeatedly used war illegally to advance its supposed interests, pushing its military alliance (that was used to push at least one of those illegal wars) right into the heartlands of Russia.
Nor will it change the reality that the Ukraine’s attempts to move towards the US sphere are driven at least as much by the hatred of Ukrainian nationalist extremists for Russia and Russian speakers as they are by fantasies of the supposed wealth that will magically appear in that country if it aligns with the global woke superpower..
You really must stop trotting out the Pravda daily editorial. you are mendacious in the extreme for ignoring the occupation of formerly sovereign countries in Europe by Soviet armed forces in the 1950’s and 1960’s – did the indigenous population issue an invitation “like the Syrian population who invited in the Russians” (not after any plebiscite, was it?); I do not recall NATO, that arm of the “openly hostile and aggressive superpower”, doing the same.
The US has a history of not getting involved in foreign wars – true it has not wholly lived up to that; but I cannot recall them wanting to add to the 51st State or expanding its “hegemony” – unlike Russia and China.
‘… an even more alarming instinct to stifle debate when debate is most needed. That such degradation and such instinct to chill speech are emanating from high officialdom, the prestige press, and academe bodes ill for free and informed expression in the United States right now. ‘
Has be just ‘woke’ up? That’s been going on for years about, but not limited to: global warming/climate change; so-called institutional racism; UK’s EU membership; energy policy; most recently every aspect of Project Covid Calamity?
As that Jacinda creature in New Zealand said echoing what that harpy Merkel said that Government truth is the only truth. And we are back to the State Jackboot stamping on all non-believers in Government truth, as can be seen with Führer Trudeau in Canada, the concentration camps in Austria, NZ and Australia for the disobedient, and other inhumanities elsewhere throughout the ‘free’ World.
And the people doing this call Putin a thug and tyrant. Hello kettle black may I introduce you to pot grimy.
I guess this is where we part company.
I held my nose over the ludicrous anti-vax nonsense. I mean, a reasonable case could be made about being hesitant over barely-tested vaccines. Certainly vaccine effectiveness was over-sold. And the morality of forcing vaccination on children struck me as abhorrent.
I kept quiet over the conspiracy theory nonsense. Because, well, there are always gonna be people who see the nefarious hand of (Bill Gates; Warren Buffet; George Soros; fill in the blank) in whatever is going on.
But if Lockdown Sceptics is hoping to hold together a coalition in support of a) Vladimir Putin’s invasion of Ukraine and b) Tucker Carlson and the loonier fringes of Fox News?
Well, it’s been nice knowing you. But the covid panic is over in the UK. It’s ending in Europe and the US.
Rack up the downvotes. But this is fast becoming not just irrelevant, but downright dangerous and unpleasant. And for now, a waste of time.
Seems like you’ll be a lot happier on the Times or Guardian comment pages, depending which kind of Blairite you are.
The covid panic may have receded somewhat but there’s no guarantee there will not be a resurgence and plenty of places are still in full swing. And there’s the small matter of trying to make sure it doesn’t happen again.
You use the cheap, meaningless smear term “anti-vax nonsense” and then enumerate a number of key points against the covid “vaccines” so not sure what you’re getting at – and the editorial line here has been fairly neutral on vaxxes – below the line not so much, and you’re welcome to make your arguments as to where we are speaking “anti-vax nonsense” – if it’s not too much trouble for you of course, and you can stop “holding your nose” for a minute.
As to Ukraine, the DS editorial line is very much condemning the invasion, and most of the BTL comments are not so much supportive of the invasion as rightly IMO sceptical about the official narrative – unless you think the govt lied through their teeth on covid but are being 100% sincere and honest about Ukraine?
Whatever you think of Carlson, who has been one of the few in the MSM who has spoken against the covid… Read more »
That’s your right.
Personally I find it possible to think that Putin making war is wrong whilst at the same time recognizing that the west has played a major role in provoking this. Knowingly so.
Professor Mearsheimer is worth reading and listening to on the geo context. He happens to be an ex US Air Force officer so hardly a pro Putin stooge.
The corporate media narrative on this whole thing is garbage. I happen to have studied Nazi Germany in some detail and the subliminal comparisons of Putin to Hitler and the constant references to Munich 1938 are nonsense for anyone who has any understanding of the WW2 era.
A more apt analogy is possibly 1914 when the immediate cause of war breaking out was Germany giving her weak partner Austria a blank cheque and egging her on against Serbia and Russia. Of course, unlike Munich 1938 there has not been a recent Netflix film about that.
Correct – it seems that to their warped minds the crimes of the US dwarf those of Russia and China but what do you expect of ex Polytechnic students of politics?
Senator McCarthy found witches on his witch hunt.
History proved him correct! Which is another thing buried by the MSM.
The problem with articles like this is that they seek to offer a rational solution to a problem driven by ideology and emotion. The Ukraine problem is very similar to northern Ireland: a protestant majority and catholic minority adjoining a larger land mass with the opposite demographic. During the ‘troubles’ was the UK justified in trying to intervene when violence broke out? Debatable. Would they have been justified in invading the entire island of Ireland like Putin? Absolutely not! The Good Friday agreement stopped the violence but didn’t solve the problem which is: in a democracy how do you mitigate the tyranny of the majority? The answer is simple: ditch democracy and become authoritarian!
The US and the Globalist UVDL run EU do not want a rational solution – they wan to take down Russia over the dead bodies of Ukrainians who they are currently arming for this very purpose.
It’s striking how dumbed down discourse has become in the 21st century. In the Cold War, even in American media there was a certain respect for the enemy, and an attempt to at least put across their perspective. Now, the only thing that’s acceptable is hysterical shrieking about how evil Russia is. We saw this with Covid too. Any attempt to equivocate or strike a balanced argument, was met with “you want everyone to die!” Maybe it’s the War on Terror, ‘with us or against us’ that set the tone for this. We’re now expected to think and talk like children.
Agree, even the cheesy movies Firefox and the Hunt for red October had a respect for them as worthy adversaries.
An adversary has to be “worthy” or “demonic” in order for the Conquering Hero to be ‘heroic” and “virtuous”!
It always fits the endless narrative.
Maybe it’s the War on Terror, ‘with us or against us’ that set the tone for this. We’re now expected to think and talk like children.
I think you might be right.
Leaving Ukraine in thrall to Europe and the west suits the globalists’ evil agenda; Russia, with an actual gold-backed currency and a strong albeit authoritarian leader has to consider controlling Ukraine and denying it to these forces the only policy. Many in the commentariat have claimed he is a WEF disciple; I have researched this and failed to find evidence despite being surprised just who in the West is. Happy to be disproved.
You are right!
Ex- KGB man Putin is no-one’s fool – not even the “Gross Deutscher” Schawab’s.
Herr Schwab tried to get Frau Merckel and Putin in at the early emergent days of the WEF Young Leaders but neither were having any of it. Scwab and the WEF puppets like to talk them up as one and the same as the Turds, Microns, Ed the Horse types, but they’re not.
Tucker Carlson is a right-wing blow-hard. I could cite literally thousands of episodes where he has peddled utter nonsense. But he seems to be reaching some sort of apogee with his defense of Putin’s invasion of Ukraine.
Post Soviet Russia signed numerous international agreements, committing to respect the territorial integrity of Ukraine and other former Soviet SSRs that had become independent. That is the fact. You can talk about NATO, you can talk about pipelines, or fracking, or antisemitism all you want.
But Putin’s Russian Government is the criminal aggressor here. Ukraine has a distinct people, culture, and language from Russia. Russia invading Ukraine today makes about as much historical sense as the British Army invading the Republic of Ireland.
Carlson has been head and shoulders above any other mainstream commentator on almost every issue of importance in the past two years, from attacking the Trump derangement of the leftist mainstream media and their criminal Jan 6th nonsense, through covid panic, mask, and vaccine mandate nonsense, and all the woke identitarian rubbish that is de rigeur in almost any mainstream outlet, to highlighting the Russia hysteria that has driven opinion in the US sphere for so long.
Is he perfect? Of course not, he’s a human being. But I have not seen any mainstream media get a fraction of the big issues correct that Carlson has done in the past two years.
It is undoubtedly easier for me to like him because I am “right wing”, as he is. Tbh, imo if you aren’t right wing by now then you are delusional.
But these terms need careful definition. I am what the US would term “paleoconservative”, to distinguish them from the globalist, interventionist, functionally leftist on social issues, neoconservatives, and that’s generally where Carlson comes from as well. That’s the “right wing” I support.
like the Minsk Agreement, eh Drew?
Muppet.
“Ukraine has a distinct people, culture, and language from Russia.” I fear you are falling into the trap of not doing your research properly. The history and culture of the “country” we now call Ukraine is extremely complex. Rather than being a long standing sovereign state its history is more akin to the former Yugoslavia – with all the attendant problems. This is part of the reason for the present mess, which has been exploited by both sides. The video linked below from David Starkey accurately explains the history of the Ukraine region and gives (IMHO) a realistic and balanced assessment of where we are – whether anyone likes it or not. The fundamental point is that the West good – Russia / Putin bad narrative really does not hold water. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=he25Rl0fE1c
Every time this sort of discussion comes up, I am reminded of Cameron’s appalling adventure in Libya (and its appalling consequences). Putin clearly was being threatened by the encroachment of the West on his borders whilst Cameron sent forces against Libya just because he could. And who is being accused of war crimes?
Worth remembering that there was no legality in the Libya war, either. The Russians (foolishly, but reasonably) agreed to a UN resolution authorising intervention for the protection of civilians, and the US sphere forces used it as a pretext to impose regime change.
That is generally regarded as one reason why the Russians were never stupid enough to agree to any UN authorisation for any humanitarian military intervention in Syria. Fool me once, etc
Fortified by their unilateral power, blinded by their belief in their own propaganda, and rendered arrogant by their assumption of superiority, the Yanks and their poodles are truly, as the Russians concluded, “not agreement capable”. They just cannot be trusted to keep to any deal or law, because they do not believe that they in their righteousness should be bound by such details, or that they in their power can be punished for ignoring them
Gaddafi wanted to build an Afro-petro-currency which would have threatened the petro- dollar……… Saddam Hussein was talking about a Euro- petro currency with the French …..Assad opposed Isil and the deconstruction of Syria…….. say no more.
Just to prove the hysteria is not just in America, but infects wider parts of the US sphere, including Airstrip One:
Labour MPs Who Attack Nato Will Be Kicked Out Of The Party, Says Keir Starmer
“Labour MPs who try to justify Russia’s invasion of Ukraine by attacking Nato will be kicked out of the party, Keir Starmer has announced.
The Labour leader said there was “no room” for anyone who seeks to blame the nuclear alliance for Vladimir Putin’s decision to attack his neighbour.
His comments, at a meeting of the parliamentary Labour party (PLP) comes just days after 11 MPs were told they would lose the whip if they didn’t remove their names from a Stop the War coalition letter attacking Nato. All 11, plus three peers, did so.”
Ah yes, Nato, Greta, NHS, BBC – good: all should be sainted yesterday!
Russia, of course, very bad.
😅😂🤣 – Labour’s last leader was a chuffing communist, and the UK Government has been lead/advised by another, a certain Susan Michie…
https://richieallen.co.uk/finally-richard-madeley-calls-out-sage-commie-susan-michie/
Since when have the American establishment been concerned about the US constitution. According to their current President, Mr Brandon 10%, it’s all negotiable.
The Supreme Court itself trashed the US Constitution when Roberts ordered them to ignore and reject the mountain of massive Election Fraud evidence and even threatened the honest Lawyers who presented it .
Looks like Biden is now ‘fixing’ the Court for good with his latest appointment !
Get off your moral high horses. “We” are no better than Russia. When Blair invaded it was because, he claimed, Iraq posed a threat to our security. When Cameron attacked Libya it was to defend our interest in the Med. When Blair attacked Serbia it was to stop an imaginary genocide in Kosovo. Sound familiar? Russia claims the same. Are Russia’s claims lies? Possibly. Were ours? You bet.
Putin is no better and no worse than any of our own scumbag “leaders”.
Go even further – Russia are now better than us!
The standard of RT reporting is a reminder of what the BBC used to be!
Very important piece. Those falling for the anti-Russian propaganda line need to understand just how pernicious, how extreme and how all-pervading it is, and has been for decades now.
This is what has shaped their ideas about the world – about Russia, its behaviour and its objectives, and about NATO, about the US’s foreign policy behaviour and objectives.
This is why they have attitudes like Toby’s, ripe for demonisation of Russia in any new context, closed to truths about the historical context, and full of squishy nonsense about NATO “keeping the peace”, spurious “rules based order”, and anachronistic manipulative nonsense about “western values”. The latter in some cases are better preserved in Russia than in the woke-riddled, political correctness obsessed, identitarian, intolerant US sphere
The last sentence sums up the hypocrisy very well. Excellent article.
Yesterday in a comment below Toby’s Russia article I noted that questioning something is not the same a denying something, so I’m glad to see this article today.
We know that over the last two years just asking a sensible and logical question has got you smeared as a tin foil hat wearing anti vaxxer…and sadly that applies, it seems, to everything.
I don’t know enough about the historical or political situation to make a valid comment, but I do know that ALL sensible discussion has got to be full and frank and everyone’s opinions have got to be heard.
Total denial of overt, fully evidenced and reported criminality in High Places is now the prerogative of the Metropolitan Police.
Part 2/2
A truth and fact of war is that the professional and well-trained Russian army will when taking a city or town return fire on anyone that shoots at them. Likewise, when advancing through the country, Russian soldiers are trained to fire on anyone in the distance carrying weapons and presumed to be enemy combatants.
President Zelenskyy – the disgusting and vile little United States’ muppet – is setting his own citizens up to be slaughtered just so he can stay in his palace and please his criminal US masters.
What about all the lying and screaming in the Western MSM about Belarus getting involved in the Ukrainian conflict? Or rather, how about the colour revolution that the cesspit United States attempted there in 2020?
The United States wanted to install a muppet in Belarus like their soyboy’s in Ukraine. Then they could set up their biolabs and throw their weight around. It didn’t work out for them, Alexander Lukashenko wasn’t having it, and like people in such situations do, he forged a close relationship with Russia and told the US to go pound sand.
Can you blame Lukashenko? You can’t, considering what the cesspit… Read more »