At a time when cooperation between East and West is essential for the survival of the human race, all those who care about the continued existence of life on this fragile planet must work together to combat the West’s old prejudices. Instead of proclaiming an inevitable “clash of civilizations” between East and West, we must strive for a new awareness of our common humanity.
This is how the USA produces hatred of Russians
By William M. Drew
[This article posted on 7/22/2024 is translated from the German on the Internet, https://globalbridge.ch/so-produzieren-die-usa-den-russenhass/.]
(ed.) There are still authors with knowledge of history who dare to criticize American foreign policy and call the warmongers by name. The US author William M. Drew is one of them. And there are still platforms that dare to publish such texts. One of them is the ACURA platform – “American Committee for US-Russia Accord”. The following article about the “Hoover Institution”, which is one of the worst warmongers in the USA, has just been published there. A two-minute video mentioned and described in this article has apparently been blocked, but it could still be downloaded by a Globalbridge.ch reader. The whole article is very informative, even without the video. (cm)
In stark contrast to the original Cold War of 1946-1989, in which a distinction was generally made between Russia as a nation and its then-communist government, the renewed hostilities between Russia and the West over the Ukraine conflict have unleashed a menacing wave of Russophobic propaganda that targets the history and culture of Russia. The West’s ideological crusade has repeatedly shown that it completely disregards the basic facts of history when trying to brand Russia as an evil, aggressive power led by a madman who threatens democracy.
A glaring example of this kind of polemic is a tw-minute video titled “Why Russia Fights,” recently produced for the «Hoover Institution» to promote the U.S.’s proxy war in Ukraine:
Why Russia Fights
The video by the Hoover Institution is not limited to the policies of Vladimir Putin’s government, but presents Russia as a unified state throughout its centuries-long history as a dark force seeking to dominate the world on the basis of an ideology based on moral superiority. Adopting this premise rules out any hope of peaceful coexistence between the West and Russia, unless, as some in the West have argued, the country is weakened and its vast territory divided into various small vassal states.
This is a far more extreme position than was held by influential individuals and institutions in the former Cold War, when the main objection in the West to the Soviet Union was its communist system rather than its entire history and culture.
The Hoover video turns history on its head by depicting Russia as the aggressor and not even mentioning the devastating invasions from the west that Russia suffered for centuries. Western aggression against Russia was the main theme of The Battle of Russia, the famous war documentary that Frank Capra produced for his series Why We Fight. This series has been so well known for so long that it seems almost impossible that today’s Western propagandists could ignore it. In fact, it is likely that the leaders of the Hoover Institution deliberately chose the title “Why Russia Fights” to counter Capra’s series Why We Fight. I am sure that the neoconservatives who made the Russophobic video are by no means as stupid or ignorant of the basic facts of Russian history as they assume the American public to be. But they clearly believe that the end justifies the means and are therefore willing to lie about the past to further their cause in the present.
The Hoover Institution apparently reckoned that its propaganda would be successful in an age of disinformation and widespread historical and cultural illiteracy. Unfortunately, they may be right. Surveys have shown that many Americans do not even know in which century their own civil war took place or which side Russia fought on in World War II. Only a relatively small number of Americans today have seen Eisenstein’s Alexander Nevsky or Mikhail Kalatazov’s The Cranes Are Flying. I doubt that many in the US today have ever read Tolstoy’s War and Peace or seen the memorable film adaptations by King Vidor and Sergei Bondarchuk.
The new Russophobia that emerged in the West during the 2014 Maidan coup – and which has become particularly virulent in the wake of Russia’s 2022 military operation in Ukraine – is far more widespread than that which gripped the country during the Cold War or in the earlier days of tsarist rule. The West’s attempt to “destroy” Russian culture in recent years, which eerily recalls the campaign against German culture in the U.S. in 1917-18 during World War I, has no parallel in previous periods of tension between Russia and the West, be it during the tsarist or Soviet era. Traditionally, the West has distinguished between Russian artists and their government, regarding the artist as an expression of the spirit of freedom, regardless of the constraints imposed on him by the regime of the day.
Now, however, in the wake of the Ukraine crisis, various analysts have emerged who claim to see the hand of Russian autocracy and ethnocentrism – a criticism that dovetails with the unfortunate efforts of Ukrainian nationalists to suppress Russia’s classical artists as remnants of imperial oppression.
That the current attitude of Western leaders towards the Russian Federation is guided by old stereotypes of “sinister Russia” is clear from a statement by President Joe Biden, who, at the Munich Security Conference in February 2018, saying that “the time will come, maybe not in the near future, but eventually the Russian people will look west and come out of the deep black hole that they have been staring into for the last 150 years or more.” If he is referring to the 1860s, then he is obviously not familiar with the great reforms of Alexander II, including the introduction of jury trial and the emancipation of serfs, which inspired American abolitionists in their own efforts to abolish slavery. Culturally, what Biden dismissed as a “deep black hole” was an age of incredible artistic achievement—the great novels of Tolstoy, Dostoyevsky, and Turgenev, and the magnificent music of Tchaikovsky, Rimsky-Korsakov, Borodin, and Mussorgsky.
But the wave of Russophobia has sought not only to erase Russia’s distant past achievements but also to distort its more recent history. In his book The Road to Unfreedom: Russia, Europe, America, establishment historian Timothy Snyder, committed to the new Cold War, wrote, consistent with his view that Russia has always been a country of tyrannical darkness , but conveniently omitted the important role that President Clinton’s advisors played in securing that victory. The Hoover Institution, which Alexander Solzhenitsyn once named an honorary member, now condemns the Russian traditions that the writer so powerfully expressed in his works as a mortal enemy of Western values. The West’s chronicle of the new Cold War ignores all of its actions that have made February 24, 2022 almost inevitable: the violation of the promise never to expand NATO eastward; the Clinton administration’s strong support for Yeltsin’s autocratic regime in the 1990s and the economic disaster that followed from that policy; the U.S. withdrawal from arms control rollback treaties with Russia; the US instigation of so-called “color revolutions” hostile to Russia in former Soviet republics, of which the 2014 Maidan coup that installed a violent, Russophobic regime in Ukraine was the most devastating; and the West’s refusal to implement the Minsk Accords that were supposed to resolve that crisis.
With US complicity in Israel’s monstrous genocide in Gaza now evident, the West’s lofty rhetoric that its response to the Ukraine crisis is part of a cosmic struggle between Western democracy and Eastern authoritarianism, has been exposed as nothing more than a hypocritical cover for the continued world domination of American military and corporate elites.
The attempt by the Western political and media establishment to stoke fears of the East, by appealing simultaneously to Russophobia, Islamophobia and Sinophobia, is rooted in centuries-old fears of “the other” that go back to ancient times. When Western countries looked eastward, they felt unease at the sheer size of these countries, the extent of their populations, the “foreign” customs and cultures of these civilizations, whose wealth and power were seen as a threat to the planetary domination of the West.
At a time when cooperation between East and West is essential for the survival of the human race, all those who care about the continued existence of life on this fragile planet must work together to combat the West’s old prejudices. Instead of proclaiming an inevitable “clash of civilizations” between East and West, we must strive for a new awareness of our common humanity.
William M. Drew is a writer, film historian, researcher and university lecturer. He is the author of “Speaking of Silents: First Ladies of the Screen” (1990) and “At the Center of the Frame: Leading Ladies of the Twenties and Thirties” (1999).
Read the original article by William M. Drew on the ACURA platform.